Myles Pritchard thought it was better in the Bahamas and Merrill Lynch didn't -- so he left for life with CONCERT Wealth Management

Brooke’s Note: As I was reading this article, I thought not about how many advisors have broken away from Merrill Lynch (and there are plenty) but how many seemingly get pushed away. A while back, we wrote about a big producer in Midland, Texas who says he got pushed out. See: Why a senior Merrill Lynch advisor reluctantly broke away with ultra-affluent clients from the Texas oil patch. More recently we wrote about an even bigger older advisor who found he was being squeezed out. See: A $2 billion, 69-year-old Merrill Lynch advisor passes up the gold watch in favor of breaking away. Both of those were different circumstances. And now here’s a story of a whole other type of practice that doesn’t fit the Merrill Lynch eye — one with a heavy international clientele. Myles Pritchard’s emotional reaction to the idea of leaving couldn’t have been more profound. Read on.

Veteran advisor Myles Pritchard, who has $100 million in assets, was told he’d eventually have to drop his international accounts if he stayed at Merrill Lynch.

That wasn’t going to happen for Pritchard, 54, who has 70 client relationships, about half of which are in the Bahamas, where he was born and lived until he was 37.

On March 23, Pritchard left Bank of America Merrill Lynch and joined CONCERT Wealth Management, where he will be the first person in the Los Angeles office. See: CONCERT Wealth Management nabbed 12 wirehouse teams in the last 12 months and this wirehouse-lite is just getting started.

What takes Merrill Lynch’s appetite away

“Merrill doesn’t have an appetite for international business,” says Pritchard, who is charged with fostering CONCERT’s international presence. “Instead of trying to figure out how they could work with these accounts, they just said, 'we don’t want that group of clients anymore.’ They were making it more difficult, and they were getting ready to close accounts down.”

In addition to moving over his assets and working with clients, Pritchard will also be responsible for assembling a team of advisors for the new office. During his time at Merrill, he had served for 1 1/2 years as sales manager, overseeing 40 brokers.

A Merrill Lynch spokesperson declined to comment for this article.

Founded in 2005, CONCERT is a San Jose, Calif.-based aggregator that targets smaller wirehouse breakaways who want to go independent but don’t want to start a business from scratch. See: The top 10 people to watch in the RIA business in 2012, Part 2.

Founder Felipe Luna is excited to have Pritchard on board.

“He’s got a lot of international business because his family are long-standing business owners from the Bahamas,” Luna says. “He’s got a really neat book of business. We don’t have any exposure in that market and we’re going to let him run this area. He’s well-regarded and well-respected.”

Choice pickings

Dan Inveen: There are many more
of these [$100 million] advisors than
there are at higher asset levels.

CONCERT has tapped a rich vein of advisors that have escaped notice by some of its larger competitors — such as HighTower Advisors LLC and Focus Financial Partners LLC — which typically want advisors with closer to $1 billion in assets.

Luna says that even he is surprised by his company’s dramatic growth spurt this year.

His firm had signed 81 transactions with advisors through the end of the third quarter.

“This is definitely a record for us,” Luna says.

There is plenty of opportunity to recruit breakaways with around $100 million in assets, says Dan Inveen, director of research at FA Insight Inc.

“There are many more of these advisors than there are at higher asset levels,” he says. “Further, wirehouses are less interested in retaining these advisors. Lastly, one could argue that this size advisor is sweet spot for firms to service — they are large enough to have good profitability but not so large that their practices require complex systems or a diversity of platforms that may be costly to provide.”

Luna says that many of the advisors at the wirehouses are increasingly unhappy with changes they’re facing, and that’s also driving his firm’s growth.

Blurred vision

In fact, one reason Pritchard left Merrill is because he felt more pressure to push Bank of America Corp. products and he felt that the client was no longer the main focus for the New York-based wirehouse. See: Merrill Lynch and Bank of America cultural tension may spin out a new round of breakaways, recruiters say.

“I never lost the focus of the clients, but Merrill lost that focus. Every day, we were asked to do more for Bank of America and the shareholder,” he says. “Nowhere did they have the client first.”

Crossing over

About 80% of clients have confirmed that they want to join Pritchard at CONCERT, and he’s hopeful he’ll take about 90% with him. Each of Pritchard’s client families have more than $1 million in assets.

“My clients want to move,” he says. “The clients are hooked into me, but there are a couple who like the Merrill shingle.”

Melancholy farewell

Despite his reservations about Merrill, Pritchard says it was wasn’t easy to make the break.

“It was difficult going home [the day before I resigned]. I cried my eyes out. But by Friday, my game face was on and I was ready to go,” he says.

Surveying the field

Before signing on with CONCERT, Pritchard considered other aggregators, although he declined to name them. Pritchard liked the model of CONCERT, but, most importantly, he trusted Luna.

“I’ve been talking to CONCERT for the better part of the last 12 months. I never made a really solid decision till the last quarter of last year,” Pritchard says.

He chose The Charles Schwab Corp. as his custodian along with JPMorgan Chase & Co., mostly because he feels both companies offer great options for international clients.

“I chose them because they have an appetite for international, and it’s a commoditized business,” Pritchard says.