Howard Diamond Quoted
By Mason Braswell
Fifteen advisers, including most recently a team in Texas managing $750 million in assets, have fled Barclays Plc U.S. wealth management group in the last month to join Bank of America Merrill Lynch following the announcement that Barclays unit was being acquired by the lesser known Stifel Financial Corp.
“Those are the cherries that they want to have,” said Howard Diamond, a managing director at Diamond Consultants, a placement firm for financial advisers. “When the Stifel deal was announced, advisers weighed the retention package that they’d get from Stifel against a huge upfront package they’d get from Merrill Lynch, so if they’re going to go to a different firm, they might as well go where they want and be paid a lot more money.”