Advisor attrition dropping at Merrill Lynch
Large firms with thousands of financial advisors working in various capacities appear to have turned the tide, at least for now, on losing advisors to their competitors or retirement, with Merrill Lynch showing a dramatic decrease in the number of advisors who left in 2023.
According to InvestmentNews data, Merrill Lynch had a net drop of 1,043 financial advisors in 2021, the year after Covid-19 brought most broker movement to a standstill. That fell to a net decline of 703 financial advisors in 2022 and, last year, to a drop of 445, or less than half the amount seen two years earlier.
At the end of last year, Merrill Lynch reported a total of 18,916 client-facing financial advisors across its various business models. In its first quarter earnings released Tuesday, Bank of America Corp., Merrill’s parent company, did not report a financial advisor head count.
When asked to comment about the declining pace at which financial advisors are leaving Merrill Lynch, a company spokesperson said: “Over the last two quarters, advisor attrition has remained below the historical average.”
The spokesperson did not give specific figures regarding the firm’s rate of attrition, which is one of the most closely watched figures in the industry.
Like Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo Advisors also showed an improvement last year in hanging onto its financial advisors.
For more than a decade, wealth management firms owned by big banks have seen a slow but steady stream of financial advisors leaving to competitors, where they can earn a bigger percentage of the annual revenue they generate through fees and commissions, and also build equity and ownership in their own businesses.
The number of aggregators, or private-equity backed buyers of
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