Financial institutions

Most logical path to the future growth of wirehouses is through their largest advisor teams.

Wirehouses have lost headcount and asset share even as the average assets under management per advisor in the channel has risen, according to a new report released Friday from Cerulli Associates.

Giant financial institutions and wirehouses that spent fortunes attracting and retaining top-producing brokers and wealth managers over the past few years may be about to get socked with a big wave of departures this year and, especially, in 2012.

Given the stagnant revenue growth that even the strongest regionals reported in the first quarter, there is no indication that Synovus has missed out on much.

On a nationwide basis, unemployment and jobless-claims data have slowly improved. But the metrics vary widely from market to market and, complicating matters, many bank operations, even those of regionals, straddle strong and weak markets.

Last year, wirehouses were hot. This year, they are not. At least not with banks trying to recruit additional registered representatives.

The wirehouse says we’re in the middle of a multi-year bull cycle for equities.

The business-cycle recovery in the global economy that began in the summer of 2009 is now an expansion, says MSSB.