A former UBS team has launched an independent, employee-owned RIA based in San Francisco, targeting ultra-high-net-worth individuals approaching or completing significant liquidity events.
Beacon Coast Partners, which reportedly oversaw $3.5 billion in client assets, marks the latest departure of a top-caliber team from UBS' private wealth operation in the US.
The firm is led by founding managing partners Michael Evans and David Jasper, who each have roughly three decades of industry experience logged on their respective BrokerCheck records with FINRA.
Beacon Coast serves founders, executives, and early employees whose wealth is concentrated in a single company, engaging clients before a transaction closes – when tax, estate, and portfolio decisions carry the greatest long-term impact.
"That transition introduces a new set of decisions, and those decisions often carry long-term consequences," Evans said in the firm's announcement Monday "Our work is built around helping clients navigate that moment with clarity and structure."
The firm holds itself out as a fiduciary, free from proprietary products or institutional mandates, and limits its client roster by design.
The Beacon Coast launch is the latest in a string of high-profile departures from UBS's US wealth management business that accelerated sharply in 2025, with many defectors going to rival wirehouse firms and others making their way to the independent broker-dealer and RIA channels.
According to the latest Diamond Consultants annual Financial Advisor Transition Report, 318 UBS financial advisors left the firm last year, with those departing advisors collectively managing close to $52 billion in assets. Industry-wide, advisor movement hit its highest level in recent memory: 11,172 financial advisors changed firms in 2025, a 16.2% increase over the 9,615 moves recorded in 2024.
Read more: Along with Commonwealth, add Osaic and UBS to firms that lost a lot of advisors last year
The firm's compensation plan changes were a significant driver of UBS-specific attrition, according to the Diamond Consultants report. Reuters separately reported that nearly 200 US advisors left UBS over the past year for rivals including Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Schwab, RBC, and Raymond James. That exodus has contributed to net new asset outflows in the Americas – UBS posted $14.1 billion in net outflows from the region in the fourth quarter of 2025, and a net outflow of $6 billion for the full year, according to Reuters.
The firm had previously projected that as many as 600 advisors could choose to leave, according to Diamond Consultants' prior annual report.
Several months ago in March, US regulators approved a national bank charter for the firm, allowing UBS to convert UBS Bank USA to a nationally chartered institution. That's given UBS the ability to offer a fuller suite of retail banking products – including checking accounts, savings accounts, and mortgages – to its US client base.
The bank has estimated that approximately $150 billion in deposits from roughly 700,000 US households currently sit at rivals such as JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, according to The Wall Street Journal. UBS expects to introduce those products toward the end of 2027, with a broader platform rollout expected in the second half of next year, according to Reuters.
Rob Karofsky, UBS's Americas president, has described the strategy as "about offense and defense," designed both to deepen existing client relationships and reduce the risk that primary banking ties anchor clients at competing institutions.
On the advisor side, UBS has also moved to raise its recruiting bonus to attract new talent.
Still, Morgan Stanley analyst Giulia Miotto wrote in a research note that investors would likely want evidence of a reversal in US flows before gaining confidence in the turnaround, and did not expect that confirmation before the third quarter of 2026.
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