Wedbush adds a $500 million UBS team in Greensboro

Wedbush's wealth management division added a Greensboro, North Carolina team on September 10: the Redstone Wealth Management Group, a four-person UBS Financial Services group with more than $500 million in client assets. James Carlson and Kevin E. Herron Jr. arrive as managing directors, investments and portfolio managers, while Patty Blair joins as a senior strategic wealth advisor and Sherry Malone as the team's client service associate.

Against Cresset's August liftout of a $4 billion UBS team in Boca Raton, or the $590 million that LPL and Raymond James landed in a single August day, this is a modest hire. It is also the more instructive one, because Wedbush is neither a wirehouse nor an independent broker-dealer, and what appears to have won the team was continuity rather than a payout grid.

Carlson's explanation is the standard one, and worth taking at face value: "As our practice has grown, finding the right long-term partner became increasingly important," he said, crediting Wedbush with "the scale, resources, and entrepreneurial mindset" to keep delivering customized advice while "preserving the personal experience our clients value." Herron cited "long-term partnerships, and individualized service"; Blair, a platform that "values collaboration and dedication." Three variations on the same theme, and no mention of economics in the quotes the announcement carries.

The structure is the tell: two principals with portfolio-manager titles, a senior advisor and one client service associate, a group that relocates with its staff intact and no infrastructure to rebuild. That is among the cheapest hires for a firm to absorb and the hardest for the origin firm to reverse, because the relationship never lived in the branch.

As this publication has argued, the block trade has replaced the breakaway, and custody is no longer the seat of the talent war. Wedbush's hire cuts with that position and amends it a little: the block does not have to be a billion dollars to count.

UBS keeps supplying teams to every affiliation model in the market. Since August, its groups have landed at Cresset, at Raymond James' employee channel in Glens Falls, at Wells Fargo's independent FiNet, and now at Wedbush. Four pitches, four answers, which suggests no single affiliation model is capturing the mid-market wirehouse team.

Wedbush's Southeast ambition is on the record. Joel Funderburk, a senior vice president and market manager, calls Redstone one of the region's most respected advisory teams, and Chris Mone, who heads wealth management, says the group "exemplifies the type of advisor team we are committed to attracting at Wedbush." The language is standard, but the Greensboro hire is the kind of tuck-in a firm can repeat without a platform build. Funderburk says Wedbush will "continue to expand our presence across the Southeast." One Greensboro team does not make a region. The teams that follow it will, and the odds favor at least one of them arriving from the same address Redstone just left.