Merrill underlines recruiting ambitions with $2.2B advisor pulled from JPMorgan

Amid a renewed recruiting push, Merrill has turned to JPMorgan to pick up a broker managing more than $2 billion for clients.

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Peter Laidlaw, a former managing director and private wealth manager at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, joined Merrill in its San Francisco offices this week. He had previously managed $2.2 billion in client assets and generated roughly $4.1 million in annual revenue.

His transition comes amid a renewed emphasis Merrill and its parent firm, Bank of America, have placed this past year on advisor recruitment. Speaking last month at the RBC Capital Markets Global Financial Institutions Conference in New York, Bank of America Co-President Dean Athanasia said the firm is engaging in “more aggressive recruiting to bring people on our platform who fit in our model and want to work in that team-based environment.”

“We have no problem recruiting,” he added. “So we’ll continue to do so.”

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Merrill’s renewed emphasis on advisor recruiting

Such statements represent a quasi about-face for Bank of America and Merrill, which for a while had come close to abandoning advisor recruiting as a way of building their wealth management businesses. In another sign of the firms’ reignited recruiting ambitions, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan flatly acknowledged at a separate industry conference in December that “we need advisors.”

Merrill executives are also hoping to fill out their advisor ranks with the roughly 2,400 industry newcomers it now has enrolled in its advisor-training program. But some of the additions will also be advisors like Laidlaw, who is joining Merrill after seven years at JPMorgan.

Laidlaw started his career in 2012 at UBS and moved to Jefferies Securities the following year. He was then at Goldman Sachs for three years starting in 2015 before going to JPMorgan in 2019. His entire career has been spent in San Francisco.

At Merrill, he’ll be part of the firm’s Private Wealth West market and report to Regional Managing Director Tracy Murphy. JPMorgan, which has more than 4,000 private bank advisors and 6,000 client advisors, did not respond to a request for comment about Laidlaw’s departure.

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Merrill also recruits from UBS

Laidlaw isn’t the only big recruit secured in recent days by Merrill and Bank of America, whose wealth units had $2.2 trillion in client assets under management by the end of last year. Last week, a four-person team formerly managing $645 million and producing $5.3 million in annual revenue at UBS joined Merrill in Miami.

The team is led by David Warren, a broker with 30 years of industry experience. He started his career at Smith Barney in 1995, moved to Merrill in 2008 and joined UBS in 2016. Also on the team are Ana Orriols, a relationship manager; John Fearnow, a senior private wealth client associate; and Sofya Preobrazhenskaya, a private wealth client associate.  

The team was formerly called The Warren Group at UBS and Warren was a managing director at UBS Private Wealth Management. At Merrill, they will be part of the firm’s South Florida & Islands Market, which is overseen by Senior Market Executive Jerry Castro.

UBS has struggled with advisor departures since announcing changes to its broker compensation policies in late 2024. Last year, it moved to soften some of those changes in a bid to retain its most valuable advisory teams. UBS reported in February that its advisor headcount in its Americas unit — which includes Canada and Latin America — had fallen 3.3% year over year to 5,772 advisors.