Youth no hindrance for this Top 40 adviser

This profile appeared earlier this year as part of On Wall Street's Top 40 Under 40. All details are as of Sept. 31, 2016. To see who else made the top 10, please click here.

Five years into a career as a fixed-income trader with BNP Paribas, Fulivo Urbinati decided to change course.

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"I always had a very good time interacting with clients, so I decided to stay close with the clients and switch my career over to wealth management, which was not an easy thing to do," says Urbinati, who ranked no. 10 on On Wall Street's Top 40 Under 40. He generated approximately $3.8 million in production.

He first joined his partners Daniele Conci and Edouard Crepy at BNP Paribas in Miami, his home since 2002, and their Eagleone team moved to Morgan Stanley's boutique private wealth management division in 2011. This year marks Urbinati's third on the Top 40 ranking.

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On Wall Street's annual ranking of successful young planners.

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Yet he still remembers how tough it was to get the team off the ground in the early days, he says.

"The most difficult thing in the beginning was overcoming my very young age with my clients," Urbinati says. "They started to trust me. And, you know the industry that we're in, it's very much word-of-mouth. They introduce you to friends, cousins, and that's how we grew."

Urbinati was born in the northern Brazil provincial capital of Belém. He emigrated to the U.S. in 2000 to attend the MBA program at Northeastern University after his graduation from the Federal University of Amazonas. Urbinati and his wife Michelle have two daughters aged 11 and 2 as well as an 8-year-old son.

In addition to his personal roots, Urbinati maintains strong business ties to his country of birth. About 85% of his team's ultrahigh-net-worth clients come from foreign countries, and half come from Brazil, he notes.

He credits his and his partners' smooth working relationship to their shared values as a group. "We truly work as a team," he says.

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