Barclays adds six advisers to U.S. wealth management team

Barclays Wealth continues to lure advisers focused on ultrahigh-net-worth individuals, announcing six new hires in three East Coast markets.

Barclays Wealth, the wealth management division of Barclays Bank PLC, continues to lure advisers focused on ultrahigh-net-worth individuals, announcing six new hires in three East Coast markets this morning.
Daniel Caso, a former Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. representative who also worked at Bear Stearns & Co. Inc., Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., joins Barclays’ Boston office and will report to regional manager Marty Courage.
Robert E. Miller, Jorge Carreras and Carlos Molina will join the New York office and report to Mark Stevenson. Mr. Miller spent the last 15 years with Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management, managing fixed-income and equity portfolios for high-net-worth individuals and family offices.
Mr. Carreras and Mr. Molina come to Barclays from Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, where they had worked since 2007. Both advisers previously had worked at Merrill Lynch, serving high-net-worth individuals and families in Latin America.
Barclays also bagged another Morgan Stanley Smith Barney team that focuses on managing employee stock ownership plans. Douglas Bayer and Joseph Gilbert will work out of the Washington, D.C., office and report to Michael Burke.
As a group, the six advisers managed more than $1.1 billion in assets and had trailing 12-month production of more than $26 million, according to a company representative. The bank does not disclose figures on individual adviser production.
Calls to officials at the MSSB, Merrill and Goldman were not returned by press time.
Barclays purchased the investment banking operations, including a small high-net-worth advisory business, from Lehman Brothers the day after the investment bank filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2008. Since that time, Barclays has been aggressively pursuing high-end advisers to fill out its wealth management division globally.
In January 2010, it launched a major initiative dubbed “Project Gamma” to build its wealth management platform. Since that time, it has hired 285 client-facing professionals globally, with more than 85 of them located in the Americas division. The hires in America brought more than $40 billion in assets under management and over $200 million in trailing 12-month production, said the spokesperson.
“Our legacy strength was trading stocks and bonds. However, we didn’t have custom lending capabilities or the ability to give clients discretionary advice. Now we can do both,” Mitch Cox, head of Barclays Wealth, Americas, wrote in an e-mail. “We spent a lot of time since the beginning of 2010 making the platform attractive to the most demanding advisers.”
Barclays Wealth managed $267 billion in assets as of March 31.