RBC Wealth Management has continued its recruitment tear, bringing on board Joseph Friend and Ross Gordon to its office in Raleigh, N.C., the company has announced.
The two new recruits come from Wells Fargo. They bring a total of $208 million in assets under management (AUM), adding to RBC’s $323 billion in client assets.
Friend will work as senior vice president, and Gordon as an associate vice president.
“RBC Wealth Management is continuing to attract high-quality advisors to our rapidly growing Raleigh office,” said Chip Anderson, director of the Atlanta division.
Wells Fargo has suffered fallout from a scandal with customer accounts at its bank.
FiNet, the independent brokerage extension of Wells Fargo & Co. that’s separate from Wells Fargo Advisors, saw record-setting figures in 2016 when it recruited $10.5 billion in AUM. However, the firm stated in an earlier interview that 2017 would not see the same success as 2016.
FiNet recruited 62 financial advisors to its practices this year, adding $5.2 billion in AUM (16 advisors and $1.9 billion in AUM in November and December). Currently, FiNet has $103 billion AUM.
Asked whether the negative press impacted its recruitment efforts, the head of recruitment at FiNet, Tim Boostrom, said, “It was an issue earlier in the year for sure. … For the first several months, there were valid concerns, but that concern has waned, dramatically. That question doesn’t come up much anymore.”
Yet Boostrom says FiNet is benefiting from a recruitment war following the fallout of two high profile wirehouses tearing up a well-known protocol for broker hiring. That protocol created an orderly process for advisors wanting to switch firms.
Morgan Stanley and UBS left the protocol this past fall, citing the evolution in the industry and their need to invest in their brokers.