It isn’t enough that Merrill Lynch is now just Merrill. It isn’t enough that more than half of your colleagues that you respect have left the firm. It isn’t enough that Andy Sieg thinks that advisor attrition is ‘seasonal’. It isn’t enough that no matter your loyalty to the thundering herd and the Merrill brand – BofA just doesn’t give a sh%t about you.
That reality was hammered home again early this week with conversations we had with two large and well known teams. Beyond the cultural rot inherent at BofA/Merrill, the compliance burden has gotten nearly unbearable.
From an advisor on the east coast, “It is hard to describe the insults that come disguised as compliance on a weekly basis. I’ve got a perfect record and have put real effort into being a Merrill guy over the years. But almost every week I’m getting pinged by compliance over dotted i’s and crossed t’s.”
“An example last week… I sent an email to a client with some good news that their mortgage rates had ticked lower by a quarter point. Less than 4 hours later I got a compliance letter that I have to respond to regarding ‘quoting rates’ in a correspondence. It’s like I’m being treated like a trainee or bank broker. And responding to this shit takes time away from growing the business. It’s constant and makes it harder to do business here.”
We did a little digging and found that this has been common practice with BofA over the past year or so. Every email, every text, every syllable is scrutinized. And if you trip up, you’ve given them cause for termination.
We put together a short podcast Q&A with Brian Neville that speaks to the issues that have caused big Merrill teams to exit the firm week after week. The revelations he shared associated with surveillance were mind blowing. When tied to the above quotes it paints a picture of a legal ‘overstate’ at BofA that is cause for serious concern.
Another reminder that more than 200 teams with $1B or more in assets have left Merrill in the past four years. Read that again. It’s becoming increasingly easy to understand why.
