UBS just lost a massive team out of its New York City flagship office at 1251 Avenue of the Americas. Paul Vigue, Renato Reali, and William Platt have taken their $2B in client assets and $14M in annual revenue elsewhere.
The team formerly called Morgan Stanley home and migrated to UBS in 2011; presumably at the tail end of the financial crisis scramble that saw unprecedented movement within the industry. Today, at the end of a historic losing week on Wall Street, the team has decided to ‘hit the bid’ at near all time practice valuation highs.
**Update – aaaand they went back to Morgan Stanley; after having left there for UBS almost exactly 9 years ago. Anyone want to guess the contractual length of their UBS recruiting deal?**
As per the teams UBS home page this is how they describe themselves:
”The Fortis Group, formed in 1995, is a team of dedicated financial specialists and active portfolio managers, offering a full range of integrated services to institutions, individuals and families of substantial means. Each member of our group has a clearly defined role and a specific set of skills. Working together, we combine these capabilities for the benefit of each client.”
Now here’s the interesting part – we’ve yet to completely confirm where they’ve landed. We have one source that’s given us the info, but we are working to confirm with a second. As soon as we finalize ‘double confirmation’ we will update this article.
The one source we did speak to did say that the announced changes to the UBS comp grid played a role in the “speed of their exit”. This isn’t a surprise as we’ve heard that chatter for better than a month.
The upshot here though is this, two weeks ago UBS landed a $20M team, and since then has lost nearly all of it in departures. Going to be an interesting 2020.
