July 13, 2022
By Jake Martin and Mason Braswell
The breakaway movement holds strong as two teams Merrill Lynch teams and another from Morgan Stanley have left to launch practices affiliated with Sanctuary Wealth and and Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network.
In the larger of the shifts, Merrill teams with offices in Colorado and California have partnered to form a single practice with $1 billion in client assets under management, according to an announcement from Sanctuary.
Michael J. Mittman, who had been with Merrill’s private wealth unit focused on ultra-wealthy customers in Denver, is joining with a traditional brokerage team led by Luke R. McKelvy, and William A. Schellenberg in Orange County and Denver. They are calling their new 11-person practice Auric Capital Partners.
“As an independent firm we will now sit on the same side of the table with our clients and have the ability to provide truly objective advice, as our only goal is adding value to each client’s financial future,” Mittman, who spent the last 14 years of his 24-year career at Merrill, said in a release.
McKelvy had spent all of his 23-year career at Merrill and said in a statement the team opted to affiliate with a broker-dealer rather than set up their own independent advisory firm because they did not want the additional responsibility of handling compliance and technology “that were outside of our comfort zone.”
Schellenberg started at Coastline Financial, a firm that was later expelled from the industry, in 1993 and shifted almost four years later to Merrill.
