Cresset pulls $4B UBS team, resets breakaway floor

Cresset has pulled a 16-person UBS private-wealth team managing $4 billion in client assets to its Boca Raton office, the latest confirmation that a family-office platform with private-equity backing can outbid a wirehouse for its most valuable private-wealth teams. Michael A. Bober and Ettore D. Ventrice, who led the group known as the BV Group, both started at Smith Barney in 1992 and moved to UBS in 2015; the rest of the team includes advisors Michael MacDonald, William Marino, Sarah Ponczek and Alex Santos. Ventrice said Cresset's family-office approach aligns with how the team always believed wealth should be managed, a pitch that has become the standard line for RIAs recruiting from the wirehouse channel.

Cresset has been recruiting aggressively since Susie Cranston, the former First Republic executive, became CEO in March; in July the firm landed an advisor managing $600 million from Manchester Capital Management and a team overseeing $1.1 billion from Lazard Asset Management. Cresset now oversees more than $260 billion in client assets, and majority ownership has passed from medical malpractice insurer Curi Holdings to a private equity firm.

The UBS loss is part of a broader outflow. An AdvisorHub tally found UBS lost at least 27 teams managing $28 billion in the first six months of 2026, with defectors joining RBC Wealth Management, Rockefeller Global Family Office and Morgan Stanley. The wirehouse has also been recruiting, taking a $300 million team from Morgan Stanley earlier this month. In May, after Lane Strumlauf stepped down, UBS restructured its Florida market, recruiting Rick Penafiel from J.P. Morgan to run a new South Florida market from Boca Raton and naming Tyler Hutchens to run Greater Florida.

That May restructuring matters because Cresset's new team sits in the same market UBS recently reorganized, and a wirehouse management transition can become a recruiting opening for an RIA with capital. It is the same family-office pitch that pulled a $14 million Merrill team to Rockefeller in Ohio, and it is starting to work at the $4 billion scale.

For advisors running the numbers, the recruiting math keeps moving: a PE-backed RIA can offer an ownership culture and a comprehensive platform that a wirehouse cannot easily replicate, and the $4 billion price point suggests that pitch now wins at the private-wealth tier. The breakaway has become a balance-sheet trade, a dynamic this publication traced through the Foreman Rial Group's move to Morgan Stanley. Every liftout resets the floor; a 16-person, $4 billion team is now the one to beat, and the next team running the math will measure against 16 people and $4 billion.