By Andrew Welsch

UBS hired a financial advisor team that previously oversaw $1 billion at Merrill. The recruiting pickup suggests the Swiss bank may be able to offset some of its recent declines in advisor head count with new hires this year.

Advisors Mark Lilley and Gabriel Trigo joined UBS in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the company said Friday. Lilley has been an advisor since 1996 when he started his career at PaineWebber, which was later acquired by UBS. He moved to Merrill, now a unit of Bank of America, in 2008, according to BrokerCheck, a public database maintained by industry self-regulatory organization Finra.

Trigo started his career at Merrill in 2014 and transitioned to Morgan Stanley in 2017. He rejoined Merrill in 2020, according to BrokerCheck.

UBS has recently been suffering from advisor departures in the U.S. following changes it made to its advisor pay plan in 2025 (it reversed some of those changes in its 2026 plan). The company ended last year with 5,772 advisors in the Americas region, down from 5,968 at the end of 2024, according to the company's fourth-quarter earnings report. The figure includes some staff in Latin America and Canada. The Americas unit reported net outflows of $14.1 billion in the fourth quarter.

Some of the teams exiting UBS have been quite large. In December, a group of advisors that oversaw $6.3 billion in client assets left to join Wells Fargo's brokerage unit in Boston. Other groups heading for exits managed more modest sums, such as an ex-UBS advisor who managed $430 million and jumped to RBC this week in Atlanta.

Write to Andrew Welsch at andrew.welsch@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 06, 2026 16:22 ET (21:22 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.