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UBS Wealth Management USA has hired a Goldman Sachs team in Washington, D.C., that is led by an advisor who previously dallied with joining Morgan Stanley, and also filled in its junior broker ranks with a recruit from Merrill Lynch.
John Hanley, Colin McKay, Michael Francis and three support staffers, who were collectively managing more than $3 billion for wealthy clients at Goldman, will join UBS’s private wealth management office in Washington after their respective “garden leaves” end, UBS said in a news release.
The notice is the second Hanley has given Goldman since 2017, when he and two other brokers were preparing to join Morgan Stanley in Washington. His former partners made the jump, but Goldman executives persuaded Hanley to stay in an attempt to retain his former partners’ clients, sources said at the time. The three brokers were producing about $10 million annually.
Hanley’s new team is a win for UBS at a time when its U.S. force of advisors has shrunk below 6,000, less than half the size of competitors like Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, amid a budgetary recruiting diet and departures by veterans. However, the Swiss bank overseas and in the U.S. has been angling its hires in recent months to private wealth bankers who it says service primarily accounts of $10 million and above.
“We continue to focus on recruiting and retaining the most productive financial advisors in the industry,” said John Mathews, UBS’s head of private wealth management and Ultra High Net Worth Americas, in a prepared statement.
Hanley, a former journalist, had been with Goldman for all but three years of his almost 16-year wealth management career. His departure comes as Goldman also has been losing private wealth management veterans and halting recruiting while pushing into the mass-affluent investor and consumer banking markets.
McKay began his financial services career as an investment banker in northern California with Robertson Stephen and Piper Jaffray, before switching to wealth management with Goldman in 2010, according to his BrokerCheck history. He exploited his banking experience to advise entrepreneurs and business owners on their personal wealth planning and liquidity opportunities, the release said.
Francis, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, shifted to the financial sphere ten years ago when he joined Goldman, and has worked with private and institutional clients.
A UBS spokesman declined to comment on the revenue the three brokers produced in the past year, and a Goldman spokesman declined to comment on their departure.
The new advisors will report to Brendan Graham, manager of UBS’s office in D.C. that is part of the Northeast private wealth market headed by Julie Fox.
The junior broker who joined UBS in St. Louis last week is Ally A. Melvin, who said she was one year shy of graduating from Merrill’s 43-month training (Financial Advisor Development) program, where she had been developing a book of business.
“Merrill was a great place for me, but I ultimately found a better-fitting team at UBS,” said Melvin, who is joining a three-broker team led by 40-year broker Rick Fister.
Merrill Lynch Wealth head Andy Sieg has focused the firm’s recruiting on novice brokers and on internal development since he announced a freeze on hiring experienced advisers in 2017.
Melvin, who worked for four months at Wells Fargo before joining Merrill in 2017, said she had qualified for an excellence award in the Merrill training program that qualified her to attend an internal conference. But she met Fister at a local networking event, she said, and really “hit it off.”
She and a UBS spokeswoman declined to comment on her assets under management.
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