Merrill recruits again while Morgan Stanley makes a capacity pitch

Two of the largest wealth businesses in the country used the same stage this week to describe opposite hiring strategies, and for an advisor weighing a wirehouse move the distance between them marks where a transition check is still on the table. Speaking Monday at the Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference in New York, Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan said growth at Merrill and the bank's other wealth units "really comes down to a little more recruiting, so the advisor population grows," while Morgan Stanley co-president Dan Simkowitz told the same audience on Tuesday that the firm holds $8 trillion in wealth management client assets but "the advisor count is not growing anywhere near those levels."

Behind the two positions sit loan balances that are anything but symmetrical: Morgan Stanley ended 2025 with $4.86 billion in recruiting balances — the forgivable loans paid to advisors who join from a rival, and, per Financial Planning's account of the conference, by far the largest total in the industry — while Merrill's balance rose nearly 50% year over year to $374.5 million. The more aggressive recruiter's book works out to roughly thirteen times the size of the firm that just restarted.

Merrill's figure is the more revealing one because it follows a deliberate pause: Moynihan pulled the firm out of recruiting years ago, questioning whether transition deals had grown too expensive, and on Monday he said the cost has not come down, noting the firm stayed out while "the deals got crazy" and is now back in the market. He said Merrill is recruiting "exactly who we want" across its 600 offices and 97 markets, and praised Merrill Wealth Management co-heads Lindsay Hans and Eric Schimpf.

The qualifier is the strategy. Merrill's recent hires include an advisor duo that had been managing $1.2 billion for UBS in Santa Fe, New Mexico — the kind of concentrated, portable team a firm can justify paying for on day one — and in the first two weeks of September the firm added three team liftouts and a single advisor move, one of the teams bringing $1.2 billion in client assets. Recruiting inside a narrow band is a different activity from rebuilding a pipeline.

Morgan Stanley's half of the week was quieter in a way that reads as a decision: the word "recruiting" did not come up once in Simkowitz's Tuesday remarks, which is a decision for a firm Financial Planning describes as long one of the industry's most aggressive recruiters — its $4.86 billion loan book is still the largest standing bid for moving teams. What the firm is selling instead is capacity. Morgan Stanley has been among the leading wealth managers arguing that AI will absorb routine work and let advisors serve more clients, and the conference discussion included predictions that automation will eventually relieve firms of some of the pressure to add talent, without anyone expecting it to replace advisors.

If that argument holds, the diligence question for an advisor evaluating the platform is whether the workflows exist behind it, because the AI edge has shifted from access to execution — owning the workflow, not holding the seat, is what converts technology into capacity. An advisor being asked to grow assets per head rather than headcount is being asked to trust that the firm has crossed that line, and the test is the same one a breakaway applies anywhere: ask what is automated, what still needs a person, and what the platform does that the advisor could not assemble alone.

Those two postures give an advisor a clean way to price a seat: a firm quoting a large transition balance is betting the move pays for itself through growth of the book you bring, while a firm talking about assets per advisor is betting it pays for itself through your capacity to take on more of what the firm already has. The first pitch suits a team with a portable book and a short runway to retirement, and the second suits a team whose growth has been capped by service, on a platform that has spent on the machinery to uncap it.

Wirehouse payouts are no longer the deciding term in a multi-advisor move; post-search economics and employee-channel support carry the decision, and every liftout resets the next package — a view the week's remarks cut against in one direction and confirm in another. Moynihan's selectivity and Simkowitz's silence both say the top of the market is still being paid for; a $4.86 billion loan book is a standing bid for the teams that clear the bar. What has narrowed is everything beneath that tier, and a firm that says it is recruiting exactly who it wants has already published its filter.

The record of the past month points the same way: The Foreman Rial Group's move to Morgan Stanley was a lesson in what a lift-out check has to cover. Cresset's $4 billion pull from UBS reset what an ultra-high-net-worth team can demand outside the wirehouse system, and a UBS team that spent two years weighing Rockefeller and LPL ran the same math and chose Raymond James' employee channel. The cap-table case — that ownership equity, not the wirehouse checkbook, now decides which firms land the next $1 billion team — is the other half of the argument, and it is the half a wirehouse cannot answer with a bigger loan.

Watch Merrill's recruiting balance rather than its recruiting language. A 2026 figure approaching half a billion dollars would mean the 600-office filter has widened and the middle of the market is back in play for transition money; a flat number, while Morgan Stanley's loan book keeps climbing, would mean the selectivity is real and the two speeches this week were describing one market from its opposite ends. The $4.86 billion loan book is the argument's price tag.