According to the complaint, 17 JPMorgan clients have told the firm that following Lewis’s departure he called them to set up meetings and initiate a transfer of assets to Wells Fargo, offering discounted fees or rebates, along with better products and services.
In particular, the complaint detailed an exchange between Lewis and a JPMorgan client in which Lewis said he was required to use certain products at JPMorgan “that were not good” and that he could “build better accounts” at Wells Fargo.
Neither Lewis nor his Tucson-based attorney, Abbe M. Goncharsky, could be reached by press time.
Some banks, JPMorgan among them, are becoming increasingly aggressive pursuing claims against bank reps who leave for other institutions and take clients and their assets with them.
Over the summer, JPMorgan initiated a flurry of court actions aimed at former employees who had moved to other firms and allegedly poached clients in the process. On July 19, it was David M. Anderson and Seth Chamberlain; on July 21, Samira Arikat and Brian Armstrong; on July 26 it was Lewis Duncan; and on July 27, Matthew Reynolds.
In all these cases, the firm asked the court to prevent the advisors from taking clients pending a resolution of the dispute by Finra arbitrators. Another common denominator among them, including Lewis, is that the advisors held the title “private client advisor,” a job which JPMorgan describes as one where the advisor occupies a desk in a bank branch office and works with existing clients. It is not part of their job to bring in new clients and build a book of business, the firm has said. That is instead the purview of JPMorgan Advisors, a division whose professionals are separate from those who work in the bank branches and also separate from another group of advisors in the private banking division.