Changes in compensation last year at UBS and LPL Financial Holdings’s acquisition of rival Commonwealth Financial Network this year are two big factors in why 2025 is seeing a rising tide of large teams of financial advisors looking to work at a new broker-dealer dealer or registered investment advisor, according to one industry recruiter.
Add in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s renewed appetite to compete and pay top-notch recruiting bonuses to advisors willing to join the Thundering Herd, and 2025 looks like a significant year for large teams – those with $1 billion or more in client assets - changing firms, said Louis Diamond, CEO of the eponymous recruiting and headhunting firm.
While a similar number of financial advisors moving to a new firm this year is running at a normal rat, the quality of the advisors being recruited and hire is better than ever, according to Diamond.
“Headcount-wise, advisors moving in a given year are probably about what it normally is,” Diamond said on the firm’s podcast released this week. “It's usually five, 6% of all advisors change firms in a given year. I think we're tracking to that,” he said on The Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors.
“But there's been many more billion-dollar-plus teams on the move,” he said. “If you look at the average [assets under management] per move, which we don't have the luxury of having that type of granular data, it's certainly going to be probably the highest we've ever seen, and I expect that trend will continue given the dynamics at UBS and otherwise.”
There are roughly 300,000 to 320,000 financial advisors who sell products or are paid for their financial advice currently working in the industry.
“From a headcount perspective, I would expect to see movement flat to slightly up,” said Jason Diamond, president of the recruiting firm. “But I think what I know to be true when we look under the hood is that the quality and size of teams in motion, between the UBS story and the Commonwealth story, is unlike anything we've seen, in my opinion.”
UBS has been leaking financial advisors this year.
After reporting in February that it was expecting financial advisors to leave the firm after changes to the firm’s compensation plan, UBS in July reported a 3.8% year-over-year decline in the total number of advisors in its Americas region.
The drop in headcount totals a net decline over the past 12 months of 229 fewer advisors at UBS in the Americas at the end of June, when its advisors headcount totaled 5,773. A year earlier, the firm reported 6,002 advisors employed in the region.
For the quarter, the firm saw a net loss of 111 financial advisors in the region during the three months ending in June compared to the end of March.
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