Raymond James's employee arm is now the independence trade

Raymond James's employee advisor arm has taken a five-person team out of D.M. Kelly & Company, moving four advisors who managed roughly $1.25 billion into a practice that now runs from Clive, Iowa as Greenwood Wealth Partners of Raymond James, InvestmentNews reported. David Lorbiecki and Dan "Chris" McPhail Jr. arrive as senior vice presidents of investments, David Haas as a vice president of investments, and Willis Gaer as the fourth advisor; practice business manager Holly Ellsworth went with them.

The door they used matters. Raymond James keeps two of them: an employee arm, where an advisor takes a W-2 and a firm nameplate, and independent platforms, which sell autonomy — and a $1.25 billion Iowa book just walked through the first. Lorbiecki's explanation leans on the word the independents have been selling for years, citing culture and, in the same breath, its "respect for our independence" — the pitch of a team that wants to run its own business without buying one.

Tenure is what makes the win expensive to reverse: Lorbiecki entered the industry in 1993 and spent 30 years at his prior firm, while McPhail started in 2007, Haas in 2008, and Gaer only in 2022. A roster carrying both a 30-year lead advisor and a first-decade one is a practice that has already sorted out its handoff, the piece of the business most teams leave undecided.

Raymond James has been on both sides of this trade this year: it lost a $545 million team in August and answered by hiring a Wells Fargo veteran, the independent-channel back-and-forth this publication covered at the time. The Iowa liftout runs in a different lane, the employee channel buying scale, and that is where the growth now sits — around Stifel's most recent quarter, the 12% asset gain was measured against a base that already excluded the sold independent book, which puts the increase in the bank-and-employee column. With a foot in each channel, Raymond James can pitch whichever one a team is already leaning toward.

John Pham and Jimmy Yip left Merrill Lynch for UBS's Palo Alto and San Jose offices, taking client associates Leslie Vinoya, Kimberly Russell and Randall Bane with them; Pham has spent more than 22 years advising Silicon Valley executives, entrepreneurs and families, while Yip has worked in financial services since 2004.

UBS put one detail on the record that firms usually keep out of it: Jacqueline Kehoe, the Silicon Valley market director the team now reports to, worked with the advisors during her time at Merrill, and UBS said that relationship was instrumental in the decision to move. A manager who leaves with a following is the recruiting channel no platform feature replicates, and here is a firm saying in public that the manager came first and the team followed.

Kehoe runs the market the team reports into; Emily de la Reguera, who leads the San Francisco Market, called the group "an outstanding addition to UBS" and "an important part of our continued growth in the region" — growth that arrived through a former colleague.

A separate InvestmentNews report noted the firm's plan to pay advisors "handsomely" for banking starting next year, and Pham's roster of executives, entrepreneurs and families is the population that plan assumes.

Counted by the body of the coverage rather than its headline, Merrill's week ran to three departures: Colin Gates, a next-generation advisor who managed more than $120 million at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, joined the branch channel of Ameriprise and The Atlantic Group in Boca Raton, Florida, a practice led by founding partners Andrew Lerner and Logan Shalmi.

Nothing in the coverage labels Gates a succession hire, but the shape is there anyway: a next-generation advisor with a $120 million book joining a two-partner practice is a firm buying a book twice, once now and once at the founders' retirement. The succession gap is really a supply forecast: only 42% of advisors hold documented plans, and the firms that build the match keep the books the independents are shopping for.

Ameriprise has been on the paying side of this market already: four billion-dollar teams to Schwab pushed the firm from riding out poaching to paying advisors to stay, and the 3.51% markdown that came with it was shareholders pricing retention as an ongoing cost. Hiring a successor is the cheaper end of the same franchise budget, and the end that compounds.

The price in this week's moves is set by the channel rather than the paycheck. Raymond James sold a $1.25 billion Iowa team a nameplate and a payroll; UBS sold a Merrill pair a manager they already knew; Ameriprise sold a $120 million advisor a seat beside two founding partners. Watch which door the next three billion-dollar books use. If they keep taking the employee version, the independent platforms will have to explain what their autonomy is worth to an advisor who can rent a nameplate instead.