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As firm-switching among brokers rose to record levels over the past four years, the number of signatories exploded, growing almost 40 fold. Many of the new signatories are RIAs....More

UBS Wealth Management Americas (WMA) expanded its advisor force by 48 to 7,015 financial advisors in the last quarter as the brokerage unit of the Swiss banking giant posted both record pre-tax profit and invested assets. In first-quarter earnings released today, UBS WMA reported a pre-tax profit of $209 million -- up 34 percent from $156 million in the fourth quarter, and an increase of 75 percent from $119 million a year ago. It had invested assets of $807 billion, up seven percent from $756 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011....More

The head of the U.S. wealth management division was its highest paid executive this year, but the Swiss bank is placing its future bets on emerging markets....More

Recruiters are having a harder time placing talent at the firm, thanks, some say, to BofA's banking culture and a string of bad press. But is the tide starting to turn?...More

The European debt crisis and global economic uncertainty were the dark clouds hanging over the Investment Management Consultant Association’s conference in New York recently....More

Robert J. McCann’s responsibilities at Swiss bank giant UBS dramatically expanded with a new appointment Thursday. CEO since October 2009 of UBS Wealth Management Americas (WMA), McCann was appointed to the additional role of CEO of the entire Americas Group today as part of a larger management shuffle instituted by the new CEO Sergio Ermotti....More

Financial advisors at UBS Wealth Management Americas (WMA) are about to go more mobile -- in a far-reaching pilot program that enables them to use an extensive array of UBS tools and other applications. At the heart of the technology is an application engineered by a Silicon Valley startup....More

The “rogue” trading loss and departure of CEO Oswald Grubel doesn’t seem to have driven clients away from UBS in the third quarter. In fact, despite the CHF 1.8 billion trading loss recorded in September, the firm as a whole turned a pretax profit of CHF 1 billion in the third quarter, and the wealth management Americas division was a bright spot, pulling in strong client asset flows....More

UBS top brass sent out a blitzkrieg of reassurances to its prized financial advisors Monday to keep them in their seats and get them to reach out to potentially nervous clients. The effort follows the double whammy of bad news about the bank out in the past week—first the $2 billion loss brought on by a rogue trader and then the resignation over the weekend of CEO Oswald Grubel, who had long said the UBS Wealth Management Americas unit is not for sale. On Monday, interim UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti and UBS Chairman Kasper Villiger sent a memo to advisors re-emphasizing that the US wealth management division is not for sale, a rumor that has been persistent despite continued denials by executives at the bank. Meanwhile, Bob Mullholland got on a call with branch managers and emphatically repeated that it is not for sale and that advisors should get in front of their clients....More

Expect these people to change your world in the next 12 months....More

UBS Wealth Management Americas continues to improve, today reporting pretax profit of $165 million for the second quarter ended June 30. That compares with a loss of $61 million in the same period last year—and a jump of 39 percent from the first quarter of this year when the brokerage unit had pretax profit of $119 million....More