An increasing number of advisors want something different from what Merrill and other wirehouses offer, but “the Merrill model is good enough for the vast majority of advisors,” Diamond said, speaking with Financial Planning afterward.

Still, she acknowledged that wirehouses have to face losing top advisors to competitors with different models.

With Merrill‘s 15,000 advisors, “it’s impossible to be all things to all people … That’s why there have been a lot of top advisors that voted with their feet” by going to competitors “and many that will continue to.”

Still, it’s neither the pay nor the tech capacities that advisors cite as their top reason for jumping ship.

“The most important factor is the ability to serve clients with more freedom and control,” Diamond said.

An independent channel could have been one such way to address that — but Merrill is choosing a different strategy.

Sieg said he thought that Merrill was obliged under regulatory requirements to supervise brokers in ways that rankled some advisors. “An advisor may leave based on, hey, they’re willing to take some of the risk to their own license and their own practice,” he said. Still, he added that the benefit of institutional resources and networking with Merrill‘s famous ‘thundering herd’ outweighed those issues for most advisors.