After 12 years at UBS, $450M team returns to Morgan Stanley

A three-advisor team with nearly half a billion dollars under management has boomeranged back to Morgan Stanley after a 12-year interim at UBS.

The Couch Group — composed of the cousins William and Gregory Couch, along with Eric Delagarza — is returning to Morgan Stanley in Watertown, New York, after leaving it in 2013 to go to UBS. The three advisors, joined by sales support staff member Wendy Ballou, had been managing roughly $450 million at UBS.

Both UBS and Morgan Stanley declined to comment on The Couch Group's move. A representative of The Couch Group also declined to comment.

Wirehouse-to-wirehouse movement

The recruiting deal is the latest to show that when wirehouse advisors leave one firm, it's often because they're looking for a similar situation where they can continue to receive a wide variety of support services and work as employees, rather than as independent contractors. That's despite a perception that the general tendency is for advisors to seek greater independence from large firms.

UBS is still dealing with the fallout from revisions to its compensation made in 2024. Those changes largely lowered payouts to advisors producing relatively low amounts of revenue for the firm while giving them incentives to do things like bring in net new assets and strike up relationships with high net worth clients.

UBS announced in September that it was reversing many of the changes with an eye toward encouraging advisors to stay put following a steady stream of departures over the past year. UBS ended its third quarter with 5,779 advisors in its Americas unit, which includes Canada and Latin America. That was up slightly from the number for the second quarter but down from 5,986 in the third quarter of 2024.

UBS advisors like 'sand flowing through an hourglass'

Ron Edde, the president and CEO of the recruiting firm Millennium Career Advisors, said he has seen little evidence UBS's recent pay changes have slowed its advisor defections. Edde has helped several large UBS teams himself, including a team that had been managing $1.6 billion for the firm in Merced, California, and recently joined LPL Financial.

"When we are watching sand flow down through an hourglass, it's difficult to focus on individual grains of sand, but we can see that many are falling," Edde said. "Unlike the hour glass, however, it's unlikely that anyone or anything is going to be able to turn this over and renew the process."

In a report released last month, the recruiting firm Diamond Consultants found that nearly 170 advisors had left UBS in the first half of the year. That put the firm on track for more departures in 2025 than in any year going back to 2022.

The same report also found that the biggest recipient of exiting UBS advisors was Morgan Stanley. Besides The Couch Group, its UBS recruits this year include Gottlieb Rose Wealth Management, a team with $1 billion in assets that joined Morgan Stanley in Manhattan this spring.

Diamond Consultant's report suggested that many departing UBS advisors are looking for a new home in a familiar wirehouse setting.

"Morgan Stanley clearly offers clients stability and a known entity, and for advisors who like the wirehouse world but are discontented with UBS' direction, Morgan Stanley represents a very compelling alternative," according to the report.

Regional firms have benefited as well. On Monday, for instance, RBC Wealth Management-U.S. announced it had picked the five-person Heller Stieffel & Noto Wealth Management team, which had been overseeing $1.2 billion in client assets for UBS in New Orleans.

Couch Group advisors and Smith Barney

Diamond Consultants President Jason Diamond said in a message that while he's unfamiliar with The Couch Group specifically, UBS is now a very different firm than it was even three years ago. "So maybe they had some buyer's remorse," he said.

When the three advisors in The Couch Group left Morgan Stanley in 2013, they opened UBS' Watertown office, according to a local newspaper account.  Before that, all three had been at Smith Barney at various times in their careers.

William Couch started his career in 2000 at Smith Barney, which became partly owned by Morgan Stanley in 2009 and then fully owned in 2013. Gregory Couch started at Lehman Brothers in 1984 and then moved to Smith Barney in 1993, and Delagarza started at Smith Barney in 2006.

UBS notches some recruiting wins

Even amid notable advisor departures, UBS has scored its own string of recent recruiting victories. They include:

• Daniel Holzer, an advisor in Westport, Connecticut, recruited from Morgan Stanley;
• Daryl Holmes, an advisor in Alpharette, Georgia, also recruited from Morgan Stanley; 
• Robert Lauer, an advisor in Franklin, Tennessee, recruited from Merrill; and
• A five-person former Merrill team in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called the Mueting Lyczak Group.