November 4, 2020

Ameriprise Nabs UBS Teams in Ohio, Maine

by Mason Braswell

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Ameriprise Financial picked off three UBS brokers last week who had been generating around $2 million in combined production.

In Akron, Ohio, Nicholas C. Bryant and Christopher S. Humphrey made the move to Ameriprise’s employee channel on Friday. They had managed $485 million in client assets at UBS, according to an Ameriprise spokeswoman.

A UBS source familiar with their practice estimated that Bryant—who had been with the wirehouse for almost half of his 19-year career—produced around $754,000 in the previous 12 months and Humphrey, who began his brokerage career seven years ago at UBS, around $700,000.

When Bryant moved to UBS in 2011 with his now-retired partner Tom Ulrich, the pair were generating $1.6 million on $260 million in assets, according to press reports at the time.

Bryant and Humphrey could not immediately be reached for comment.

In Portland, Maine, Ameriprise on Friday hired Troy Abbott Malbon, who had been with UBS for nine years of his 15-year career. Malbon, who also joined the firm’s employee channel, managed about $63 million in assets, according to the Ameriprise spokeswoman. Sources said he had been generating around $450,000 in annual revenue.

Malbon referred requests for comment to his branch manager, Benjamin Henchel, a 14-year career Ameriprise veteran, who declined to comment.

In a previously unreported move, Ameriprise’s employee channel in August also hired UBS brokers Jon Bloomer and Ross Fedenia in Middleton, Wis. They had managed $238 million in client assets, according to the Ameriprise spokeswoman. Bloomer had been with UBS since 2009 and began his career 30 years ago at Salomon Smith Barney. Fedenia started his career five years ago at Robert W. Baird & Co. and moved to UBS in 2017.

UBS has experienced high attrition in its American brokerage arm, and now has fewer than 6,000 U.S. brokers. That is less than half the size of its wirehouse competitors and lower than the almost 10,000 employee and independent contractor brokers at Ameriprise. (Throughout its Americas wealth unit, including advisors in Latin America and Canada, UBS employed 6,353 advisors as of September 30, down a net 274 from 12 months earlier.)

The shrinkage is partly intentional. UBS Wealth Management Americas cut its recruiting budget in 2016 and in some years has constricted payout percentages to stimulate asset gathering and weed out lower producers. It exited the Protocol for Broker Recruiting three years ago in an effort to prevent defections of upper-quintile producers, and also has recently been hiring advisors and private bankers with large books of client assets.

Average production of UBS Americas brokers is around $1.4 million, according to UBS’s third-quarter earnings report.

Separately, Ameriprise lost a two-advisor family team in Miami, FL, that was managing $258 million in client assets to Janney Montgomery Scott on October 30, according to a Janney spokesman. The advisors are Roark “Rocky” Young, a 40-year industry veteran, and Dustin Young, a broker for 13 years. They had been with Ameriprise for five years.

Ameriprise hired 99 advisors in the July-September quarter, although attrition shaved its roster of brokers across its employee and independent “franchise” channels by 25 to 9,905 from the end of its 2019 third quarter. Around 2,100 of those are in its employee channel.