There are wirehouse moves that would be big in any year, and then there are moves that are likely to set records for a long time to come.
The latter was the case for a mammoth 90-advisor group with nearly $130 billion under management that cast all other departing teams under its shadow by leaving Merrill to start its own RIA affiliated with Dynasty Financial Partners. But the departure of OpenArc Corporate Advisory in Atlanta, and the resulting lawsuit, was an outlier in a year peppered with recruiting deals that would have topped annual lists in any other time.
Some of the biggest moves fell in line with some notable trends. UBS, which itself predicted it would lose advisors following changes to its compensation policies, not only saw a large number of individual advisors depart this year but also some big teams.
Meanwhile, firms like Wells Fargo and RBC continued to prove their appeal to advisor teams. Even Merrill, which had been in the recruiting doldrums, brought in one of the biggest teams.
Before embarking on our list of top moves to and from wirehouses and other Wall Street mainstays, a few qualifications are in order. Firms are usually not shy about trumpeting their most-notable recruiting deals, but there’s always a chance we didn’t learn of a big move simply because the participants didn’t announce it.
We also decided to not include private-banking teams, even though they tend to boast very large AUM tallies. The reason: Private bankers often have a harder time than regular advisors moving assets over to their new firms.
On the topic of assets, in most years a team with $1 billion or more under management would probably have made the list of top departures. But with their asset tallies perhaps buoyed by bull runs in the stock market, advisors needed to have at least $2 billion in client assets to make this year’s cut.
With those caveats noted, read on for the 10 biggest moves of the year:
