Ameriprise Hires RayJay, UBS Solo Practitioners in FL, CA

Ameriprise Financial in the past week landed a pair of solo practitioners in Florida and California, continuing an aggressive recruiting stance.

Alexis Lenssen, a 23-year advisor in Daytona Beach, FL who said she manages more than $100 million for 200 households, left Raymond James Financial’s employee channel on Monday after 13 years to join Ameriprise’s branch in the city with a client associate.

“They paid me a huge recruiting bonus” she said and guaranteed her Raymond James payout, which is about two points higher than the standard Ameriprise grid, for two years.

Higher compensation—including a ten-year forgivable loan of about 2.5 times her trailing-12 production—was not her motivating factor in moving, she said.

She cited growing restrictions on her autonomy at Raymond James, saying she was recently required to turn over investment decisions on a large retirement plan to a home-office specialist. (“I do not need a babysitter to pick a lineup of mutual funds in a Transamerica plan,” she said).

She considered going independent with LPL Financial, and fielded offers from Janney Montgomery Scott and some wirehouses, but accepted Ameriprise because she knew many advisors in the local office and has been pleased with its account transfer support and technology.

Lenssen, a certified financial planner, had overseen two other advisors as a RayJay branch manager, one of whom retired last year and another who remains at the firm and declined to join her, she said. One person familiar with her practice said she had been managing about $84 million at RayJay.

On the West Coast, Ameriprise recruited UBS Wealth Management USA broker Emily S. Chan on Wednesday to its independent channel.

Chan, who had been with UBS for more than half of her 17-year career, was managing $107 million in client assets, and will work as an independent advisor from an office in the San Francisco suburb of San Rafael, a spokeswoman said.

Chan, who ranks #683 on Forbes’ 2020 list of Top Women Advisors, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Ameriprise has been offering deals that can reach as high as three times a top advisor’s 12-month production, recruiters have said. All firms “take 100 pounds of flesh when they give you money,” Lenssen observed, but said she considers her 10-year deal a “downpayment” on her retirement.

Lenssen first registered as a rep in January 1997 with Smith Barney, moved to Wachovia Securities six years later and had been with RayJay since October 2007, according to her BrokerCheck history.

Chan began her career at Charles Schwab & Co. in 2003, and worked at Bank of America Investment Services and Smith Barney between 2006 and 2009. She joined UBS in San Francisco in December 2010.

Minneapolis-based Ameriprise hired 75 brokers in the second quarter, though its advisor count of 9,894 across its two channels was down by 57 from June 30, 2019. About 2,200 are in its employee channel.

Ameriprise’s largest hire this year was Mike Abrams, who joined last month from a Wells Fargo Advisors bank unit in Palo Alto where he led a team managing $7.1 billion.