UBS Bought $5.3 Billion of Recruits and Lost $11 Billion

01UBS recruits well and loses more#

Start with the exits. Jeff Cullman and W. Bruce Holt moved seven people and $1.3 billion in client assets out of UBS to Ascend Advisory Group, a Wells Fargo FiNet affiliate in Dublin, Ohio. Four of the seven were client associates. WealthManagement.com counted it as another poaching win away from UBS's U.S. wealth division since the bank restructured its compensation plan in 2025. If the pay overhaul is what is pushing teams out, some of the recruiting money is refilling seats the bank's own comp plan emptied.

Russell Price and Salvatore Mineo are the quieter case. They ran MPI Wealth Management inside UBS in Las Vegas, with about $750 million in client assets and three support staff. They launched Truing Capital Advisors with a minority investment from Elevation Point and custody at Goldman Sachs. They had joined UBS on the same day in March 2014 from Nevada State Bank, according to BrokerCheck records cited by AdvisorHub. More than a decade in the seat did not hold them.

Neither team was large by wirehouse standards, and that is the uncomfortable part. The books a firm pays up to recruit are no harder to carry out the door than the ones it has already lost.

The buy side holds up its end: UBS's eight arrivals came as eight separate teams with $5.3 billion between them. The sell side is simply bigger, and both sides are counted the same way. An advisor weighing a UBS offer is being asked to believe that his book will behave unlike the aggregate, that the $11 billion left for reasons that do not apply to him. Sometimes that is true. Teams leave for their own reasons, and coverage of a move reports the assets, not the cause.

The record cannot tell an advisor whether his book will stay. It can tell him what happened to everyone else's.

LPL leads the arrivals table with $42 billion of disclosed books, ahead of NewEdge Wealth at $15 billion on the same measure. It is also the strongest argument against this piece, and it gets a full hearing below.

02Morgan Stanley and Ameriprise are running the same trade#

UBS is not the outlier. Morgan Stanley matches it at $11 billion of disclosed books leaving, across eight teams; Ameriprise lost $8.8 billion across six. Neither firm makes the twelve destinations in the arrivals table, which bottoms out at five arrivals.

Rise Private Wealth Management is what leaving looks like at scale. About 40 advisors from Ameriprise's independent channel launched the Bedford, New Hampshire RIA on Sept. 10, with Dynasty Financial Partners handling back-office support. The Moves Wire records the breakaway at $8 billion. AdvisorHub reported it as at least the third billion-dollar-plus practice to leave Ameriprise this year to start an independent firm. Three in a year is a pattern, not an accident.

Fathom Advisors made the same move at a smaller size. A 22-person team in Bloomington, Minnesota left Ameriprise after three decades to open an RIA with $1.3 billion in client assets, Schwab as custodian per its Form ADV, and a place in the Protocol for Broker Recruiting. Randy Doroff had spent his whole career at Ameriprise and a predecessor firm. Career loyalty is not a retention plan.

Ameriprise buys, too. Andrew Lerner's Atlantic Group brought $1.6 billion from Oppenheimer to Ameriprise in Boca Raton in September. So in one window, at one firm that says it retains well, the recruiting desk landed a $1.6 billion team while the retention side lost a team the Moves Wire puts at $8 billion.

The arrival gets the announcement. The departure shows up later, in somebody else's.

03The disclosed-book objection is real, and it does not rescue the package#

Take the objection at full strength. Of the 229 movement records in the period, 60 carry no book at all, and the $178 billion behind the rest is book value as coverage reported it. Those reports are soft. Forbes put the Rise team's assets at $4.3 billion as of March 2025; Barron's listed $8.1 billion including assets under advisement; the Moves Wire records $8 billion. A measure that can nearly double depending on who is counting is not a precise instrument.

Worse for this argument, a firm can shed large, low-margin books and add smaller, more profitable ones. Nothing in the record shows revenue, fee rate, client tenure or margin, so nobody outside the firms can prove the outflow is unprofitable. Ameriprise makes the retention case directly. The firm, which shows $8.8 billion of disclosed books leaving, says it has "strong retention among highly productive advisors".

strong retention among highly productive advisors

Ameriprise spokesperson, in a statement reported by AdvisorHub

LPL is the hardest case. It took 18 teams and $42 billion of disclosed books, the biggest gross haul in the record, and it supports more than 32,000 advisors. Recruiting at that scale looks like a franchise rather than a transfer. It is the best evidence that packages can build something that lasts.

Yet LPL leaks as well. ICG took $2.3 billion from LPL to Osaic in October. Sierra Ridge Advisor Group took $2.1 billion to Cetera in August. Midwest Financial Group took $450 million off LPL-owned Commonwealth for Osaic. The $42 billion is a gross number, and gross numbers flatter everyone, the biggest recruiter included.

The Protocol for Broker Recruiting, which Fathom joined on its way out of Ameriprise, keeps movement cheap in both directions. The rule that lets a team bring client data in lets the next team carry it out.

Concede all of that and the package is still not rescued. An imperfect measure does not turn $5.3 billion of inflow into a defense when $11 billion of the same measure walks out. The softness also cuts against the firm. It is not offering the advisor a revenue split or retention by cohort that would show the shrinkage is harmless. Net new assets by channel, disclosed quarterly by the firms that write the checks, would settle the question. Until a firm publishes that, its disclosed outflow row is the closest thing to a scorecard it has.

That table is the whole evidentiary base for this window. It is thinnest exactly where an advisor needs it most, on what each package cost and what each departing team gave up to leave.

04Price the package after forfeiture, then read the paying firm's flow#

They do not describe what the Moves Wire does: what happened to disclosed books at the firm writing the check. And the coverage is silent on cost. Reports on the two large UBS exits do not say what either team forfeited by leaving.

Those exits still mark out a range. Teams that size have leverage over the forfeiture schedule. Ask for the schedule before the headline number. A package that looks rich at signing is worth a good deal less once the cost of the next move is priced in.

Ownership is the other price. Jim Atwood and Phil Scott left JPMorgan with $18.6 billion, opened Latigo Peak Partners in Palm Beach Gardens with 48 professionals, and funded the launch themselves rather than taking private equity capital. Inside the bank their combined revenue had grown from $34 million to more than $130 million over six years. The platform was working for them. What it could not match was the value of owning the business.

There is a middle road. Elevation Point, which backed Truing, usually takes at least 20% of a partner practice and is pursuing a $50 billion growth target over two years. Ascentis added four Raymond James practices with more than $1 billion and kept Raymond James as their primary custodian. A team can change employers without changing custodians, which removes one of the oldest reasons to stay put.

At the small end, leaving costs almost nothing. XY Planning Network has 110 firms working toward registration, up from 60 a year earlier. RIABiz described solo XYPN shops opening at a near two-a-day pace.

For a recruiter, the ranking follows. Rank targets by the disclosed books leaving the firm that employs them, set against what that firm is taking in. Our read of this record is that the supply sits at UBS, Morgan Stanley and Ameriprise, and the buyers are LPL, NewEdge Wealth and the RIA platforms. A target's current employer is where the books come from. Treat it that way.

Two dates will grade the argument. LPL reports third-quarter results after the market close on Oct. 27 and holds a call at 5 p.m. ET; that call is the place to ask the largest gross recruiter in the record how much it kept. The next 90-day Moves Wire window will show whether UBS's outflow row is shrinking or the packages are still buying less than walks out. If UBS's disclosed departures fall below its arrivals on the same measure, this piece is wrong about UBS.

The advisor holding an offer should not wait for either date. Ask the recruiter for the paying firm's disclosed inflow and outflow over the same 90 days, on the same definition. A firm that cannot produce them is selling a story about itself.