October 14, 2025
Jason Diamond Quoted
By Dan Shaw
Last month, UBS announced further revisions to its compensation policies designed in large part to roll back the least popular parts of the previous changes, while giving advisors yet more of a nudge toward high net worth clientele. Jason Diamond, the president of Diamond Consultants and primary author of the report on UBS, said in an interview Tuesday that he thinks the recent update will make little difference in the firm’s loss rate.
Diamond said many UBS advisors were no doubt prompted to look toward the exits by the earlier compensation changes. But that came on top of other causes for grievance, none of which is likely to go away anytime soon.
Like many employees of Wall Street wirehouses, UBS advisors can find themselves bogged down by bureaucratic delays in simple tasks like awaiting approval of marketing materials, Diamond said. On top of that, UBS’ drive to improve its margins has made the firm reluctant to set money aside for expenses such as adding support staff.
Some of the changes UBS made in late 2024 merely brought its compensation in line with pay policies found at the other wirehouses — Merrill, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. For instance, UBS abandoned what it had called its Combined Team Grid, which had allowed wealth managers on advisory teams to be paid out a percentage of the group’s total production. Its replacement, the Highest Producer Grid, allows advisors on a team to receive payouts only as a percentage of the revenue generated by the highest-producing member.
Other wirehouses had long been doing the same, Diamond noted. He reemphasized that no single policy was behind the UBS advisor exodus.
