UBS trio with $480M in AUM exits for Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo has again turned to UBS for a recruiting win, this time picking up a team of three advisors previously managing nearly half a billion dollars in northern Alabama.

Jason Schrimsher, David "Andrew" Mann and Miles Stumb joined Wells Fargo Advisors on Feb. 12 in Huntsville, Alabama. They had previously managed $480 million at UBS.

Wells Fargo is one of many firms that have benefited from advisors departing from UBS after the Swiss firm announced changes to its compensation policies in late 2024.

Wells' recent recruiting wins from UBS include:

• Hingham Street Partners, a 16-person team in Boston that had $6.3 billion under management and nearly $39 million in annual revenue production at UBS.
• A team composed of former members of the Frost Saler Coles Wealth Management Group at UBS led by the advisors Brad Saler, Steven Kalodner and Michael Coles. They had managed $687 million in client assets at UBS in  Marlton, New Jersey.

The latest team to join Wells Fargo from UBS had been part of UBS' Huntsville Wealth Management Group. Schrimscher started his career at Dean Witter in 1999 and moved through various firms before joining UBS in 2009. Mann has been at UBS since 2014 and Stumb since 2021.

Wells Fargo said in a statement that Schrimscher, Mann and Stumb have "earned a strong reputation as trusted advisors by taking a thoughtful, goals driven approach with their clients." UBS did not return a request for comment for this article.

READ MORE: Amid UBS advisor exits, 25-year veteran joins Morgan Stanley

UBS' push to drive up profit margins

UBS executives have repeatedly acknowledged that they may lose advisors amid steps taken to improve the profit margin in their U.S. wealth management business. Speaking last week at the UBS Financial Services Conference in Key Biscayne, Florida, CEO Sergio Ermotti emphasized a need "to make sure that there is a good balance between what shareholders make and what financial advisors make."

UBS' advisor headcount in its Americas unit, which includes the U.S., Canada and Latin America, has been steadily dwindling. The firm reported in an earnings call on Feb. 4 that the Americas unit ended last year with 5,772 advisors — a number largely unchanged from the previous quarter but down 3.3% year over year.

UBS reported in the same earnings call that it saw $14 million in net client outflows in the fourth quarter. Yet amid those losses, the U.S. wealth management unit's UBS Americas' pretax profit nearly doubled from a year earlier, reaching $417 million.

UBS has made headway with its profit margin in its U.S. wealth unit. The margin — or the percentage of revenue left over after the subtraction of expenses — rose above 13% toward the end of last year.

Ermotti has set a goal of pushing that closer to 15%, which would still lag behind the margins posted by many of its U.S. competitors. Morgan Stanley, for instance, has a pretax margin of over 30%.

READ MORE: UBS continues to bleed assets as advisor departures slow

UBS looks to U.S. banking to help its wealth unit

Ermotti has said that the wealth management units of many of UBS' rivals in the U.S. benefit from being surrounded by complementary businesses. Although UBS, like Morgan Stanley and other firms, has a large investment bank, its presence isn't as large in the U.S. as some of its direct competitors'.

"Where we definitely are smaller than our peers is that the set of banking businesses that we have on the platform — the U.S. platform — is not as comprehensive as our peers," Ermotti said at the financial services conference last week. "And that drives some level of competitive disadvantage in being able to share this fixed cost of a banking platform across different businesses."

UBS applied in October for a national bank charter in the U.S. If granted, the designation will allow the firm to offer banking products like checking and savings accounts and payment services to its U.S. wealth clients.

"Now it's fair to say that we haven't really invested enough in banking capabilities," Ermotti said last week. "Our lending penetration is increasing in the last seven quarters. We improved it every single quarter, but it's still below what we could do."

UBS, meanwhile, has not gone quiet on the recruiting front. The firm recently announced it had brought in a pair of financial advisors who had previously managed $1 billion at Merrill.

Mark Lilley, who had been at UBS before joining Merrill in 2020, and Gabriel Trigo, who moved to Merrill from Morgan Stanley in 2020, are joining UBS' Puerto Rico market in San Juan.