Raymond James Financial (RJF) said Tuesday that it recruited its largest team ever in terms of client assets: the West Nyack, N.Y.-based Mahoney Group, who were with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch (BAC), which has managed and administered about $2.9 billion in client assets and had yearly fees and commissions of $7.7 million.
This news follows last week's recruiting of a team in Guam that did business with Morgan Stanley; the Asia Pacific Group has some $1 billion in institutional and retails client assets and $3 million in annual production. In June, Raymond James added a Morgan Stanley team with roughly $2.4 billion in assets held by institutional and retail clients in South Florida.
While Raymond James says it intends to keep growing its employee-advisor headcount in the Northeast, its latest recruits say they are glad to now have the flexibility they need to grow their business.
"We moved for a variety of reasons – which really center around the value proposition we offer clients and that was increasingly difficult to deliver," at Merrill Lynch, according to managing director Chris Mahoney, in an interview with ThinkAdvisor. Mahoney had been with Merrill since 1982.
What's now different for the team – which also includes advisors Kevin Mahoney (Chris' younger brother), Mark C. Marotta, Kristen Koluch and Phil Murphy?
"We have much more flexibility vs. what we had at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. This manifests itself in many ways, such as having easy access to no-load mutual funds and other products from Fidelity, Vanguard and T. Rowe Price, for instance," explained Chris Mahoney.
The advisor added, "This access is important to us, and [the lack of it] was a hindrance at BofA-Merrill … [I]t's a competitive issue."
More than half of the group's client assets are held in defined benefit/defined contribution plans, and this business brings in roughly 25% of fees & commissions.
