Wirehouse advisors

Firms with big recruiting loan balances are often the ones with the most success hiring advisors from industry rivals. But the numbers also suggest they're offering increasingly generous deals.

In Wells' latest big recruiting deal, two separate groups at Merrill are coming together to form Twin Harbors Private Wealth at Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, or FiNet.

Principality Private Wealth adds to the 115 teams &Partners has onboarded since its founding in 2023.

Wealth head Andy Sieg sees bank-based advisors as key to securing more of the $3 trillion its U.S. banking customers hold elsewhere. But he's also looking to AI.

Bartoli Private Wealth Management Group comes to Wells Fargo following two other large advisory practices that recently joined from Morgan Stanley and UBS.

Wells' latest advisor recruiting coup comes just days after it pulled over a 19-person team formerly managing nearly $6 billion at Morgan Stanley.

The Taylor Group of Wells Fargo Advisors is led by nine advisors, all of them relatively young and many of them siblings.

After experiencing $14 billion in assets outflows in the last quarter of 2025, UBS brought in more than $5 billion in the first quarter of this year.

Compensation differences between wirehouses and regional firms become pronounced at the $2 million production level, with regionals rising to the top of the pay scale and wirehouses grouping together at the bottom.

When it comes to compensation, firms really start to distinguish themselves at the $1 million production level. Janney has become one of the lower payers in recent years, while RBC and UBS have signaled a greater willingness to work with these advisors.

CEO Brian Moynihan said the firm recruited twice the number of advisors it did a year ago and is making progress fighting advisor attrition.

Chief Financial Officer Sharon Yeshaya says financial advisors have $400 billion in assets since 2020 from clients who first came to Morgan Stanley either through its workplace or E-Trade businesses.

For advisors with $600,000 in annual production, regional firms like Janney and RBC have been reducing their compensation in recent years. They're now more in line with the pay policies more commonly found at large Wall Street firms.

In the first quarter, the firm's FiNet channel for advisors working as independent contractors recruited advisors with $9 billion in client assets.

Top executive Jane Fraser dismisses speculation Citi wants to buy a U.S. retail bank while touting surging revenues for the megabank's wealth unit and the firm as a whole.

Most "regional firms" still have fairly generous compensation for advisors at the low end of revenue production. But at Janney and RBC, the pay rates are lower and much closer to those of large Wall Street firms.

Traditionally, regional firms were places where advisors with mid-level revenue production could find comfortable homes. Janney and RBC show how that's changing.

Touchstone Wealth Partners is the fourth team with more than $1 billion in client assets to join Wells Fargo's FiNet unit this year.

The addition of Peter Laidlaw to Merrill's offices in San Francisco comes as firm executives aim to engage in "more aggressive recruiting."

Michael Outlaw, the recently named president of Rockefeller Global Family Office, says family offices are defined more by the services they offer than by their relationships with wealthy families.