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.
“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.
Well no kidding…. and someone finally lays it all out there….
“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.
And the rest of the sheeple stay put at their desks and wonder why they don’t have a fat check in their own accounts.
That’s pretty “broker friendly”. Paying the new people huge checks AND a higher grid than the loyal FAs who are currently there. Ha!
Some of us would never need to take a big fat check from a BD to move across town and then have 100 pounds of flesh removed. That’s because some of us fill up our SEPs, add money to HSAs, and build taxable accounts for decades, invest the money well, and become truly wealthy on our own. Others of us seem intoxicated by switching offices every 7-10 years and gorging on blizzards of “trailing 12” cash. For me, that has never passed the sniff test…..but that’s just me.
The only SEP you can “fill up” at a wirehouse comes from the Switching Employer Paychecks. Players gotta play the game they’re in, not the game they’re watching. Congrats on your game.
When your broker dealer starts making crazy changes and doing unnecessary oversight, then u start to look around. The money is a byproduct. But there is alot of greed out there i understand your comment.
The history of the business…. These firms never “add” to loyal advisors, but they roll out the red carpet for recruits that usually leave months after their deal is over.
At my firm of RBC the new recruits have driven up average advisor production stats and then the grid levels are raised citing “avg production.” Long term legacy advisors are incentivized to leave! They have made it clear they don’t care about most advisors unless we can somehow grow by huge percentages year after year which is especially hard to do when they are simultaneously taking “small” accounts away from us!
Funny how these articles cite the “billions” in management but never check if an unmanaged concentrated stock position has anything to do with it.
Or if most of the AUM is the advisors’ own money!