Industry

RCAP CEO Nick Schorsch says the deal could be a "tipping point" in a new wave of private equity investment in independent broker-dealers.

Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer James Gorman said his firm’s wealth-management unit can earn a pretax margin of more than 23 percent by 2015 as interest rates and stock markets climb.

Morgan Stanley has a plan to boost return on equity in fixed-income trading above its cost of equity after four of the five units failed to meet that metric last year, Chief Executive Officer James Gorman said.

Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest lender by assets, will consider acquisitions of as much as $4.9 billion as it seeks to expand its wealth- management unit, Chief Financial Officer Janice Fukakusa said.

UBS gave its force of about 7,000 U.S.-based advisors new compensation incentives to use financial plans with clients this year. The plan increases the pay their financial advisors receive when creating those plans, and has resulted in an uptick in their adoption so far this year

Morgan Stanley has turned to Wells Fargo and UBS for new advisor hires for the second time this month.

A $1 million producer has jumped from Morgan Stanley to Raymond James in Columbus, Ga.

First Allied Holdings, an independent broker-dealer, is set to be acquired by RCAP Holdings.

With the passing of Dodd-Frank, the SEC is paving the the way to adopt a uniform fiduciary standard for broker/dealers and investment advisors. Barry Glassman of Glassman Wealth says that there's no feasible way for brokers to uphold the same fiduciary standard to which RIA are held. He writes, "for them to come under the fiduciary standard as it currently exists, their businesses would have to split up into so many micro pieces that it would be disastrous for them." But the alternative, as it is being proposed, is for the very meaning of the fiduciary standard to change.

John Hancock Financial Network is picking up another 280 registered representatives?with the acquisition of Symetra Investment Services.