Merrill executives say core members of a large team that broke away last year to start an independent practice remain at the firm, underscoring a year of historically low departures for experienced advisors.
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In an earnings call Wednesday, Merrill Wealth Management co-head Lindsay Hans said a large portion of employees in the firm’s Global Corporate & Institutional Advisory Services team near Atlanta remain in place, “and they continue to serve clients every day.” The principals of the GCIAS team stunned the wealth management industry in September when they left to start a registered investment advisor called OpenArc Corporate Advisory.
Before that departure, GCIAS had roughly 90 advisors and $129 billion under management, much of it in equity-compensation and retirement plans. In a lawsuit filed in September over the move, Merrill said it had lost 100 employees from the GCIAS team, including at least 67 advisors.
Merrill ultimately failed to win a restraining order to prevent the departed group from moving clients and assets over to their new firm. But it can still press its claims against the OpenArc founders before a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel.
Hans said Wednesday that even with the departure, Merrill and its parent, Bank of America, continue to have a leading workplace-benefits business.
“We have more than 6 million plan participants,” she said. “We’ve got thousands of employer-sponsored plans.”
Renewed emphasis on advisor recruiting
Rather than focus on the GCIAS loss, Hans and her fellow executives directed attention to what Merrill and other parts of Bank of America’s wealth management business are doing to build their advisor workforce. Hans said the units not only saw a record low of experienced advisor departures in 2025 but also an increase in advisor recruiting from the previous year.
“We continue to come to work every day, knowing it’s a very competitive environment,” Hans said. “And so you know, we’re not here to predict anything in the future today. But we operate this business, similar to all wealth management leadership teams in the industry, in a very competitive environment.”
Like many firms, Merrill and other wealth management units at Bank of America have ceased providing a headcount for advisors. Merrill and Bank of America’s number — still at around 18,000 — began to dip a few years ago when executives took a deliberate step away from industry recruiting.
They’ve since reversed that position. Speaking in December at a Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan signalled a reignition of the firm’s recruiting engines, saying “we need advisors.” In an earnings call on Wednesday, Bank of America Chief Financial Officer BofA Chief Financial Officer Alistair Borthwick said in the firm’s earnings call that the firm’s recruitment of experienced advisors is accelerating, although it still “isn’t an enormous part of our strategy.”
Hans and other Merrill executives have meanwhile said they want to bring in at least $150 billion in net new assets a year to the firm’s wealth management divisions, an ambitious goal unlikely to be met without pulling advisors from industry rivals. In 2025, Bank of America’s global wealth and investment management (GWIM) unit — which includes Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank — saw its net new asset haul rise by 3% to $82 billion.
Hans also noted that Merrill has roughly 2,400 industry newcomers enrolled in an advisor-training program and regularly offers educational courses to experienced advisors. Such investments, she said, constitute one of three distinct parts in the firm’s growth strategy — the other two being doing more with existing clients and bringing in new clients.
“The third pillar of our growth strategy is around investing in our advisors at every stage of their careers,” Hans said. “That is from new-advisor training. That’s around the retention and development of our experienced financial advisors at Merrill today, and it’s also about our ability to attract the talent of experienced advisors from the competition.”
New client households with $10 million in assets
On the other parts of that strategic plan, Hans noted that Bank of America’s wealth management businesses added more than 21,000 new client households in 2025. Of those, 18,000 are clients of Merrill.
“You’ve heard us talking about moving upstream, so if you look specifically at a few numbers among those net new Merrill clients in 2025, 80% of them brought us more than $500,000,” Hans said. “That’s up from 72% the year prior.”
She also said the wealth units saw the number of households with $10 million or more in assets increase by 14% in 2025, without giving a total number. Hans said roughly 20% of the new clients for Bank of America’s global wealth and investment management business, which also includes Bank of America Private Bank, come from internal referrals from the parent firm’s banking business and divisions.
“When you look across all those lines of business, at the base of approximately 69 million individuals and 40,000 corporate clients, we are the only firm that has the full spectrum of individuals and businesses in-house at this type of scale,” Hans said. “Each of these clients has walked through a door other than GWIM. … But as their needs grow, as their needs evolve, that is where we are here to serve them.”
That cross-selling of financial services works both ways. Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank reported that loans to wealth management clients rose by 13% last year to $264 billion.
“Custom lending saw loan balances increase 29% as we provide liquidity for clients to buy, build and refinance commercial real estate, acquire businesses, invest in lifestyle assets such as yachts, jets and high-end residential properties,” said Eric Schimpf, also co-head of Merrill Wealth Management.
Record revenue for Merrill, climbing client balances
Schimpf and Hans’ remarks came following another strong year for Bank of America’s wealth management businesses. The global wealth and investment management units saw their annual revenue rise by almost 9% year over year to $24.9 billion. Merrill’s revenue on its own was also up by 9% to $20.7 billion, an annual record.
“Fourth quarter contributed a record $5.5 billion in revenue up 10% year over year, driven by higher asset management fees and loan debt interest income,” Schimpf said.
Those revenues were in part generated on the nearly $2.18 trillion in client assets the wealth units had under management by the end of the year, a figure up 16% from the year before. Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank saw their revenue from management fees surge by 13% to $4.1 billion last year.
Adding in investments, deposits and loans to AUM, Merrill said it finished the year with $4 trillion in client balances, while Bank of America Private Bank ended with nearly $800 billion. The wealth units reported their net income rose by 20% to $1.4 billion.
