NewEdge and LPL place bank-bred teams in new structures

WealthManagement.com’s Thursday Deals & Moves roundup put two advisor-team wins side by side, and the pairing says more than either move alone: the independent channel has stopped mining wirehouse books and started building continuity around the advisor. NewEdge Wealth is opening its fourth Florida office with four advisors whose résumés run through Bank of America’s Private Bank, while LPL Financial is moving a $395 million team into Linsco, its W-2 employee channel, where three advisors will build a firm under their own name. One feeds an independent RIA’s local outpost and the other a broker-dealer’s employee channel, but both are bets that the asset in motion is the client relationship, not the advisor’s current production.

The NewEdge move comes from NewEdge Capital Group, whose founder and managing partner Rob Sechan described the four recruits as advisors who “understand the complex wealth management needs of innovators, athletes and families.” Paul Yates, Alexandra Escobedo, Trace Shapiro and Michael Wohlgemuth all worked at Bank of America’s Private Bank, with earlier stops that include Merrill Lynch, Franklin Templeton, Thomson Financial Research, TradeStation and Barry Financial Group. Yates and Shapiro each have more than a decade in the industry, Escobedo more than 15 years and Wohlgemuth more than 20.

NewEdge Wealth now counts more than 70 ultra-high-net-worth advisors across 20 locations, including New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and it opened its Houston office in August with a team from AllianceBernstein’s Bernstein Private Wealth Management. The Florida quartet will focus on high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices and institutional clients, and the one-two of Houston last month and Fort Lauderdale now reads as a branch strategy: build local presence rather than wait for books to come to market.

LPL’s accounting is different. The San Diego-based independent broker-dealer, which reports $2.6 trillion in brokerage and advisory assets, said a team overseeing $395 million in advisory, brokerage and retirement-plan assets has joined Linsco. Ryan Lewis, Dan Hocking and Steve Braatz will launch ClearHaven Wealth Management in Oakdale, Minn.; Lewis left Morgan Stanley, while Hocking and Braatz arrived from RBC Wealth Management. The team works with clients approaching or living in retirement, many of them in multigenerational relationships, and LPL says the advisors were drawn to its technology, support resources and the chance to build their own brand.

The same weekly report notes acquisitions by Wealth Enhancement, Maridea and Summit Wealth, with target firms from Alaska to Pennsylvania, so firm-level M&A has not slowed. But the team-level hires show where the platform war has gone: recruiting is no longer a transition-cash contest; it now turns on which platform gives an advisor the most credible story to tell a client about the next two decades. NewEdge’s story is that the advisor is the local face of a national UHNW firm; LPL’s story to the ClearHaven founders is that they can have the balance-sheet size of a $2.6 trillion dealer and the brand of their own shop.

ClearHaven’s base of retirement-age families is exactly the population whose assets are about to move over the next two decades, and the governance and continuity questions that dominate succession planning apply directly to them. NewEdge’s Florida clients are ultra-high-net-worth families and family offices, the segment where those questions are most acute. Both firms are betting that the advisor, not the previous employer’s logo, is the institution the client stays with.

The moves follow a week when LPL and NewEdge were among four firms adding advisor teams. Both are building channels rather than filling seats. LPL’s Linsco has become a wirehouse-compatible home for advisors who want employment without the wirehouse’s bureaucracy; NewEdge’s office expansion gives private-bank veterans a local platform without the bank’s comp grid. The NewEdge four all passed through Bank of America Private Bank at some point, a reminder of the private-bank channel’s role as a feeder for independent firms.

If the model works, LPL will prove that an employee channel can supply what wirehouse advisors most want—the safety of a W-2 and the brand of a founder—and NewEdge will prove that an RIA can take UHNW talent out of the private-bank system and give it a local stage. Neither proof is in hand yet. The advisors with the client relationships are moving to whichever platform can make the client’s next decade feel secure. That is a much harder metric for Morgan Stanley and RBC Wealth Management to match with a comp grid.