J.P. Morgan Advisors hires ex-Merrill's Patel for 80-advisor Southeast

J.P. Morgan Advisors hired Linda A. Patel, a former Merrill Private Wealth regional leader, to head its Southeast territory from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, AdvisorHub reported Oct. 27.

Patel oversees about 80 advisors in Palm Beach Gardens, Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Miami and Atlanta and reports to J.P. Morgan Advisors head Mollie Colavita. That is about 13% of the unit's roughly 600 advisors, a business AdvisorHub describes as a small fraction of JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s wealth operations. She succeeds Janet Sweeney, a 40-year industry veteran who retired earlier this year after joining J.P. Morgan through its 2023 acquisition of First Republic Bank's wealth unit.

For advisors in those five offices, the next seat up is now a manager who ran Merrill's Texas ultra-high-net-worth brokers. Above her sits Colavita, a former senior Merrill Private Wealth executive, who took the unit's top job in October 2025 after the retirement of Phil Sieg.

The appointment came a little over a week after two of J.P. Morgan's largest teams left to launch RIA Latigo Peak Partners, also based in Palm Beach Gardens. The teams had generated $130 million in combined revenue from $18.6 billion in assets. As Private Wealth Daily previously reported, Rockefeller added a seven-person J.P. Morgan team in Houston.

Moves Wire records eight advisor moves involving Merrill in the past 12 months, the most recent on Sept. 25, when John Pham moved from Merrill Lynch to UBS. Patel's exit was a management departure, not a book move: she was one of two Merrill Private Wealth leaders who left in July 2025 as the firm cut six regions to four. She started at PaineWebber, the UBS predecessor, in 1998 and joined Merrill through a predecessor later that year, according to BrokerCheck.