RBC builds La Jolla on Bank of America's private bankers

The second Bank of America Private Bank team to join RBC Wealth Management's La Jolla branch in about a month arrived with two advisers, two associates and more than $2 billion in client assets, according to InvestmentNews. Lisa Behun joins as a financial advisor and managing director, Dirk Harris as a financial advisor and senior vice president, and neither arrives alone: senior financial associate Kevin Wilson and senior client associate Erin Marshall moved with them. The branch hired Damon Couch, another Bank of America Private Bank advisor, last month, according to RBC, so its two most recent additions came from the same competitor. Whether that reflects a deliberate channel or two sets of advisers reading the same local market, the coverage does not say.

Both hires land on top of RBC's summer, which produced teams described as billion dollar-plus, one from Stifel into Dallas and one from UBS into Palm Springs. Moves that size are negotiated above the branch; a two-adviser team that brings its own associates is a local decision, and local decisions are how a firm changes its position in a market without the change ever appearing in a quarterly recruiting total.

The practices behind the La Jolla numbers are what a bank branch pays for. Behun works with high-net-worth families and business owners, combining wealth strategy, financial planning and credit with an approach rooted in behavioral finance; Harris, more than 25 years into the business, helps affluent families and business owners work through complicated finances and plan for goals decades out. "Clients come to them during pivotal moments in their life," said Marcel TenBerge, RBC's Southern California complex director, who added that the firm expects the team to use its platforms to take client service further.

California traffic has run in both directions in our coverage this year. In August, FiNet took two California teams while Raymond James answered with a Wells Fargo veteran. La Jolla now gives RBC a Southern California anchor in the bank-private-client channel, where the list of firms able to credibly pitch the business is shorter than the list chasing brokerage production.

Merrill hired Jeff Chanin from Wells Fargo for its Boca Raton, Florida office, and the shape of the move matched La Jolla at brokerage scale. Chanin reported overseeing approximately $240 million in client assets and generating about $2.8 million in production at Wells Fargo, and his 30-year FINRA record includes previous stops at Merrill, Morgan Stanley, Citi and Prudential. Registered client associate Tara Mirjah moved with him into a Boca Raton office led by senior resident director Scott Kauffman, inside Merrill's Florida Tropics Market run by market executive Jason Edelmann.

Wells Fargo Advisors, for its part, added Robert Henry and Rex Stanczak from Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. in Ann Arbor, Michigan, carrying nearly 60 years of combined experience and approximately $355 million in client assets; support staff Lori Lessel and Katti Jankowski went with them.

None of the three announcements discloses a transition package, note or forgivable loan, and the only production figure reported is Chanin's $2.8 million, the number that anchors how a brokerage deal gets sized and says nothing about the terms Merrill agreed to. That silence is why the staffing lines in these announcements are worth reading twice: when the economics are invisible, the composition of a team is the only disclosed evidence of what a firm thought it was buying.

In all three cases the buyer took the advisers and their support. Chanin's deal is legible in production against assets because brokerage practices are priced that way. The La Jolla pair's economics go undisclosed, and the shape of the practice explains why: at a private bank the investment account is one thread in a relationship that also runs through planning, credit, and the family-business work Harris has done for a quarter century, and the associate who follows the adviser is the one holding those threads in place.

Four $3 billion Fort Lauderdale teams moved in a single day earlier this month, at a pace where block trades now set the terms for the top of the wirehouse market; branch-level moves carry the real recruiting signal, and this week's evidence sits in that category: two advisers, their two associates, and a book that is more than five times the $355 million Henry and Stanczak took to Wells Fargo and more than eight times Chanin's reported $240 million.

The bet in La Jolla is on the arrangement around the assets rather than the assets themselves. A brokerage book trades with the market and the rate cycle and can be repriced in any quarter; a private bank relationship gets renewed at every liquidity event and every fresh credit need, which makes it a longer-duration asset than a production number implies. Behun's blend of planning, credit and behavioral finance and Harris's 25 years of family-business work are things a bank branch cannot assemble in a single hiring cycle, and the associates who followed them are what keeps a client from ever having to test the difference. As this publication has argued, whoever owns the client record owns the economics; at a private bank the record is a planning engagement and a credit facility as much as it is an account, and RBC has just hired two people who keep it current plus two who keep it filed.

The sample is still small. Two rounds of hiring from the same competitor at the same branch in about a month could be two advisers reading the same market at the same time. A third Bank of America Private Bank name in La Jolla would make it a channel.