[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

No Morgan Stanley broker left behind?

Merrill is circling Morgan Stanley, which is still recovering from a rocky computer conversion and billions of dollars in losses out of Facebook's botched IPO.  What Merrill wants: lists of top Morgan Stanley Wealth Management brokers who are considered ripe for defection, acccording to people familiar with the firm's recruiting.

To this end, Merrill has:

• enlisted some of its 11 market executives (regional managers who report to brokerage head John Thiel) to call managers, through lower-ranking workers such branch managers
• provided select managers with hiring authority lists of Morgan Stanley advisers and targeting those who have shorter employment contracts
• offered some top advisers large bonuses – case in point: a high-performing broker who produces $1 million in revenue who is in line to receive a pay package with at least $1.5 million upfront, plus deferred compensation

Where the firms stand now:

• 16,934 = the number of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney brokers
• 16,151 = the number of Merrill Lynch brokers

For its part, Morgan Stanley is trying to get its brokers to stay.

• Last month, brokerage President Gregory Fleming and Andy Saperstein, Head of Wealth Management, US, and other executives met with some 40 top-tier advisers in the firm's institutional consulting business at a conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York.  There, management pledged to invest in the consulting business, a unit that serves endowments, pension plans, and many of the firm's richest clients
• introduced brokers to roughly a dozen department heads
• detailed dates for planned technology fixes
• gave some advisers their direct e-mail addresses and phone numbers so they could be reached more easily

For further details, go to [WSJ, 10/1/12].