Merrill Lynch financial advisors explain why they're leaving 'Mother Merrill' in droves, even as the 107-year-old brokerage wows Wall Street with record financial results (2024)

He built a successful career over three decades at Merrill and fostered lifelong friendships there. He was part of a large team managing $1.2 billion in client assets and was the senior resident director of the firm's office in West Fort Worth, Texas, from 2006 until he left this year.

But the culture, which Bruce described as a "community, not just a firm," had changed. After its fire sale to Bank of America in the throes of the financial crisis, pressures from on high grew, including mandates to sell banking products and quotas for signing on new clients. There were too many moments when Bruce felt like he was just another big-bank employee.

Bruce is not alone. Some 321 advisors left Merrill from January through October, compared with 103, 147, and 153 advisor departures during the same period at Wells Fargo, UBS, and Morgan Stanley, according to a BrokerCheck data analysis by Ron Edde, the chief executive of the recruitment firm Millennium Career Advisors.

Many of them, like Bruce, had years — even decades — with Merrill under their belts. Advisors interviewed by Insider often spoke lovingly of the Merrill of old. They pointed to a combination of Merrill's changing culture and the growing opportunities for advisors to strike out on their own as reasons for leaving.

The Bank of America deal was more than a decade ago, and experienced Merrill advisors have for years been jumping ship. But the firm is losing advisors with large books of business in droves when there is more intense competition for recruiting and retaining talent than ever before. Wall Street rivals like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are ramping up their wealth-management businesses to take on the likes of Merrill and Morgan Stanley. And opportunities to become an independent advisor unaffiliated with a bank have grown.

In other words, this latest wave feels different, insiders say. They noted that Merrill stopped its practice of paying big bonuses to poach advisors with big books of business several years ago; it now focuses almost exclusively on training new advisor talent internally.

"For most of my career, if people were at Merrill Lynch, they didn't leave. They were lifers," said Steve Wagner, an advisor with Merrill Lynch from 2009 to 2015. "That has changed."

For nearly a century, Merrill was the premier independent brokerage. And the advisors were its thundering herd who prided themselves on running their practices like small-business owners, not employees. Talk to any Merrill Lynch broker who worked there before Bank of America's purchase and they will regale you with tales of what a special place it was.

A statement on the homepage of a website called Mother Merrill dedicated to company nostalgia and connecting former employees summarizes these feelings. "I know that I truly loved working at Mother Merrill," the site's owner, who says he is a retired longtime employee, wrote. "It was never a job for me, where I hated to get up on Monday morning."

Seeking to convey the pride and loyalty many advisors have felt for Merrill, a current employee pointed Insider to another longtime employee who had a bull tattoo on his ankle. He, too, left the firm, the current employee said. (The supposedly tattooed advisor didn't return requests for comment.)

Bank of America closed on its deal to buy Merrill in January 2009, with an eye toward using the thundering herd as a distribution arm to help it grow deposits, loans, and other products. It started tasking advisors with helping clients open Bank of America credit cards, checking accounts, and mortgages — a job some advisors chafed at, describing it as menial and meddlesome.

Merrill has since changed in other ways. It now heavily emphasizes growing its client base through internal referrals from Bank of America — getting away from a culture of enterprising advisors going out and cultivating relationships with new clients.

Financially, these changes have been great for the company.

Merrill reported a record $4.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 19% from a year ago. In the third quarter, Merrill and the private bank together reported a record $5.3 billion in revenue, or roughly a quarter of Bank of America's overall revenue. And even with limitations for meeting prospective clients in person, advisors have added record numbers of clients. Merrill now oversees $3.1 trillion in client balances, an all-time high.

But behind the scenes, the firm is paying a hefty price: an exodus of experienced advisors who once loved the firm so much they thought they'd never leave.

'You're appreciative of some of it — the ability to have the scale of the banking platform," Wagner, the former Merrill advisor, said of Merrill's ties to Bank of America. "You're not appreciative of the heavy-handedness in trying to do cross-referrals and direct business to the bank," he said, describing Merrill's place inside the bank as a "double-edged sword."

Wagner, who now runs Omnia Family Wealth, a multifamily office in Aventura, Florida, looks back fondly on the dedication and loyalty of the thundering herd. But advisors, he said, grew frustrated with mandates to sell more banking products to clients.

Merrill's main competitors, known as wirehouses, are also seeing experienced advisors walk out the door. And Merrill has typically had the largest base of advisors to lose — it had 17,331 at the end of 2020. Morgan Stanley had just under 16,000. Wells Fargo and UBS reported having 13,513 and 9,575 advisors.

Still, there are signs that departures at Merrill Lynch have accelerated. When experienced-advisor exits rose to 5% in the second quarter from an average of 4%, the firm's president, Andy Sieg, said attrition was higher than the firm would like to see, AdvisorHub reported in July.

Advisors say that selling bank products like mortgages takes away the control they would typically have over a client relationship. Plus, cross-selling certain products just isn't lucrative for them.

Merrill has defended cross-selling as advantageous as clients look for more products and services from their advisors. Sieg told Insider that Merrill clients were increasingly seeking out advice that encompassed all aspects of their financial lives: planning, investing, banking, and lending.

"For advisors who want to offer clients comprehensive advice, backed by the industry's finest capabilities, there's no better place to be," Sieg said in a recent interview.

It's all part of the firm's transformation to what leaders have called the "modern Merrill." The strategy is "advisor-led, powered by digital," Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said in an October call with analysts to discuss earnings.

Sieg said this encompassed five goals. It involves becoming a truly full-service wealth-management business, moving away from its old-school roots as a transactional brokerage shop. It means becoming a firm that is far more racially diverse than it's been in the past, and one that can train the next generation of advisors effectively. And it means growing existing advisors' practices organically, with a focus on acquiring new households, and providing advisors the technology to do it.

"There are probably two key ways that we stop and ask ourselves, are we on track here? Most importantly, our success revolves around our clients' success. The feedback that our clients give us is of paramount importance," Sieg said, adding that clients' satisfaction had risen to 94% from 86% in 2016. The other way, he said, is measuring overall financial performance such as client balances and revenue.

There are also outside forces compelling longtime Merrill advisors to leave.

Andy Ferguson, an advisor in Las Vegas, graduated from college in 1983 and joined Merrill Lynch. He passed his securities exams and, alongside other fresh-faced employees, completed rigorous training — like role-playing client conversations with colleagues in Merrill's headquarters in lower Manhattan — that he views as the very best on Wall Street.

Most trainees didn't make it through. Merrill's and other firms' programs have historically had low graduation rates (something Merrill has said it is seeking to improve). But Ferguson would stay at the brokerage for nearly four decades.

His team oversaw $360 million in assets for wealthy clients by the time he left Merrill last year to found Proquility Private Wealth Partners, an independent wealth-management firm where he is the chief executive.

"For me," he said, "it was a chance to re-create what I felt was the culture of the original Merrill Lynch that trained me, that I grew up with," and to bring his work back "to where the only priority, the only focus walking into my office, is the best interest of my clients — the only constituency I answer to."

Advisors like Ferguson can start their own firms more easily today, thanks to the rise of companies that help advisors set up their own wealth firms with their backing — and to an infusion of private-equity backing and other funding for those companies in recent years.

There are now a record 14,000 registered investment advisors overseeing $110 trillion in assets, according to the Investment Adviser Association, an industry lobbying group.

Sieg said that competition from RIAs was not new and that Merrill embraced it. There will "always be an ebb and flow of firms coming together and becoming larger, technology enabling new models to take root and to grow," Sieg told Insider.

Merrill's challenges and long-term vision are a microcosm of a changing Wall Street.

Nobody needs advisors to pick stocks for them anymore, and advice is getting cheap, so the bar for paying for services has soared. Firms are looking to diversify their overwhelmingly white and male ranks to capture the changing demographics of America's wealthy. The job market is hot everywhere. Between startups and traditional players and the independents and tech giants, the playing field for wealth offerings is crowded. Banks are recruiting advisors left and right. And holding on to clients' kids has never been a more daunting task, with younger generations showing little loyalty to legacy brands and institutions.

While some longtime advisors are unhappy with the changes Merrill has implemented to meet these challenges, Wall Street is applauding the transformation.

Erika Najarian, an analyst who left Bank of America for UBS this year, said in a client note this month that she was bullish on Merrill's growth prospects — and that advisor headcount growth was not necessarily a yardstick of success.

The opportunity to grow wealth-management services with existing clients is "crucial to point out," Najarian wrote, as the bank's management "was not relying upon increased advisor headcount to drive growth."

Danny Sarch, the head of the New York wealth-management recruitment firm Leitner Sarch Consultants, put it more bluntly.

"Merrill has successfully changed from entrepreneurial to bank-driven," he told Insider. "It strikes me that they're doing a lot right, given the hand they are dealt."