Broker-dealer CapTrust Advisors adds its first Midwest-based advisory team. Members of an Akron, Ohio-based team that combines brokerage services for high-net-worth clients and retirement-planning services has left Merrill Lynch for Raleigh, N.C.-based CapTrust Advisors.

Team leader Steve Wilt, who had been with Merrill for more than 2 decades, Susan Clausen, Paul Stibich and Will Lyle -- former members of Merrill's Star Group -- have upped stakes for CapTrust, which, like Merrill, is a "captive" brokerage -- meaning that its brokers are employees rather than self-employed affiliates.

Better served

"This was a very big decision for me, as I have spent my entire career building my client base and many important friendships and relationships while at Merrill Lynch," says Wilt. "But the industry has changed dramatically over the last few years and it became clear to me that our clients would be better served working with an independent firm, like CapTrust, that held a specialized focus on providing retirement advice."

Thomas Ulrich, a 30-year Merrill veteran who combined his private-client practice with Wilt's retirement-plan business in 1997 to form the Star Group, remains at Merrill with several other Star Group members.

Merrill became a part of Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America at the end 2008. Since then, several high-ranking Merrill executives who were positioned, pre- and immediately post-merger, as members Bank of America's top-echelon leadership -- among them former CEO John Thain, briefly head of Bank of America's global banking and wealth- and investment-management operations, and former retail-brokerage chief Robert McCann -- have left amid revelations that Merrill's exposure to toxic mortgage-backed securities was greater than at first understood by Bank of America and that Merrill had been, under the circumstances, a little over-generous with its 2008 bonuses. Bank of America's CEO Ken Lewis has said that he tried to back out of the September 2008 agreement to acquire Merrill in the weeks before the deal was completed, but was urged to see the acquisition through by U.S. government authorities -- which last month kicked in another $20 billion in bailout funds and over $100 billion in debt-loss backing for Bank of America.

CapTrust's CEO Fielding Miller says that the success of 20-year-old CapTrust, a firm that specializes in retirement advisory, is closely linked to its ability to attract top advisors. "It goes without saying that we are thrilled to add such a highly-regarded team [as Wilt and his associates] to our experienced group of advisors."

With about $22 billion in client assets, CapTrust has 38 brokers in offices in Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., Jackson, Miss., Richmond, Va., Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston and Portland, Maine -- and now of course in Akron. -FWR

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