Another Former Merrill Broker Makes His Way Back -- Street Moves
August 04 2016 - 02:24PM
Dow Jones News
By Michael Wursthorn
Another Merrill Lynch alumnus has returned to the Bank of
America Corp.-owned brokerage, making him the latest "boomerang
broker" among the four big Wall Street players.
Merrill Lynch said Thursday that Habib Yousefzadeh joined its
Oklahoma City branch late in July from rival Morgan Stanley. Mr.
Yousefzadeh had been at Morgan Stanley since 2009 after a
seven-year stint with Merrill, according to BrokerCheck, the
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's database on brokers.
A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman confirmed Mr. Yousefzade's
departure, but declined to comment further.
With about 26 years in the financial-services industry, Mr.
Yousefzadeh built up a $110 million wealth practice that generated
more than $1.1 million in annual fees and commissions, Merrill
said.
Mr. Yousefzadeh is Merrill's latest so-called boomerang broker,
or someone who has returned to a previous employer in the brokerage
industry. In May, the Bank of America unit rehired Andrew Zimmerman
and his team of brokers, who collectively oversaw $1.2 billion of
client assets, from Morgan Stanley. Later in May, John Campanello,
another Morgan Stanley broker, returned to Merrill, the firm
announced at the time. Mr. Campanello managed $200 million for
clients.
Brokers who move among the four big U.S. brokerages -- Merrill,
Morgan Stanley, UBS Group AG's U.S. wealth unit and Wells Fargo
Advisors -- are typically offered lavish recruitment packages,
which can reach multimillion-dollar levels for big producers. That,
recruiters say, tends to be a driver behind many brokers'
moves.
But for brokers to return to a firm they once worked at hints at
another point: Brokers view the big brokerages as being mostly
similar. Merrill, Morgan Stanley and the others tout their
differences, but their underlying services for investors are mostly
the same, including open-architecture investment platforms that
offer in-house and third-party investments, lending and insurance,
among others.
"Most advisers see all of the wirehouses as interchangeable and,
in large part, they are," said Mindy Diamond, president of
wealth-management recruitment firm Diamond Consultants in
Morristown, N.J. "For sure there are differences between them, but
at the end of the day, they are all big bureaucracies....So, if
they are pretty much all the same, then if an adviser realizes that
the firm he left wasn't so bad after all, and he can get paid a
transition package as incentive, why not do it?"
Merrill, for now, has one key difference from its rivals: its
Merrill Lynch One platform for adviser s.
Launched in 2013, it replaced five aging platforms, each with
its own fee schedule, enrollment process and website. Merrill Lynch
One's single fee schedule is expected to help the brokerage comply
with some of the requirements under the Labor Department's
fiduciary rule that brokers put the interests of retirement savers
as their guiding principle, not the suitability standard that
critics said led to clients being pitched products that paid
commissions to the brokers.
New Merrill hires and even brokers who recently left the firm
have lauded the system, saying it cuts back on paperwork when
bringing on a new client and that it is simpler to use compared
with some rivals' offerings. Ms. Diamond adds that brokers have
found the platform "very appealing."
It has also helped Merrill boost its fee-based assets and
revenue, something the industry has been driving toward. Bank
executives say the fee-based asset revenue is more predictable and
steady compared with transaction fees, which can vary from quarter
to quarter depending on market conditions.
Write to Michael Wursthorn at Michael.Wursthorn@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 04, 2016 14:09 ET (18:09 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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