RBC recruits $770M UBS team in New York

RBC’s U.S. wealth management division is making further inroads in New York State with a seven-person advisory team pulled from UBS.

RBC Wealth Management-U.S. announced this week that Creative Strategies for Modern Wealth Group is joining it in its branch in Syracuse, New York. The team had formerly managed $770 million at UBS.

Creative Strategies for Modern Wealth consists of five advisors — Michael Wirtheim, Ronald Scott, Nancy Collins, Ronald Molinari and Eric Petranchuk — and two client associates. The team members arrived at UBS through a wide variety of paths.

Wirtheim started his career at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in 2001 and went to UBS in 2005. Scott began in 1992 at PaineWebber, a brokerage later acquired by UBS, and later moved through several firms before joining UBS in 2007.

Collins started at McDonald Investments in 2001 and moved to UBS in 2011 following a short time at Key Investment Services. Molinari started at Lehman Bros. in 1981, went to Smith Barney in 1993 and joined UBS in 2009. And Petranchuk began at M&T Securities in 1998 and, following stints at various firms, arrived at UBS in 2024. 

UBS has seen large numbers of advisors leave following changes it made to its compensation policies last year. The changes reduced payouts for low-end revenue producers and made more modest cuts for some advisors higher up on the income-generation scale.

This year UBS has rolled back some of those compensation changes in the hopes of stemming advisor defections. Large teams have continued exiting, though.

UBS ended its third quarter with 5,779 advisors in its Americas unit, which includes Canada and Latin America. That was up slightly from the number for the second quarter but down from 5,986 advisors in the third quarter of 2024. 

RBC reported last year that it had roughly 2,200 advisors in its U.S. wealth management unit.