Thomas Buck, a 33-year veteran of Merrill Lynch who was fired last month, said he never saw it coming.
He arrived at the office at 8 o'clock on March 4 for what he says he thought would be a routine meeting with local and regional managers. By the end of the day he was being escorted out of the building.
“I was totally blindsided,” Mr. Buck, 61, said. “I'm thinking I'm going into the back nine of my career and going to leave a nice legacy.”
Mr. Buck, who was the firm's top adviser in Indiana by assets, is one of the latest in a string of big-producing brokers to find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly terminated, including a $2.5 billion
veteran Bank of America Merrill Lynch team in Rochester, N.Y., and a
top LPL Financial adviser in Texas with $3.8 billion in assets.
Brian Hamburger, founder of MarketCounsel, a firm that provides legal counsel for independent advisers, said it's becoming a more common occurrence as larger firms take a closer look at compliance. Mr. Buck is a client of Mr. Hamburger.
“I don't want to sound the alarm and say that every financial adviser at Merrill Lynch is in jeopardy of losing their job,” he said. “But this type of sudden line of questioning and inquiry leading to termination without notice is becoming more the norm at every level of production.”
When he arrived for the meeting the day he was fired, Mr. Buck was greeted by three attorneys representing the firm, along with the local manager, who said they wanted to ask him some questions about how he ran his $1.3 billion practice, the adviser explained in an interview. They said nothing was going to happen that day and that they planned to be in touch in the coming weeks if they had suggestions about how to improve things, Mr. Buck said.
“I was trying to explain everything as thoroughly as I possibly could, looking for help to make sure I'm doing everything in perfect compliance,” he recalled. “I gave them every detail I could.”
The meeting lasted an hour-and-a-half until Mr. Buck left to go to a doctor's appointment, thinking that the conversation had gone well, he said. When he returned, however, he was called into his manager's office where he was read his termination letter and told to gather his wallet, keys and coat and was promptly escorted from the building by security.
Mr. Buck had not been subject to any client complaints during his career aside from one client complaint in 2006, according to his BrokerCheck record with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. That complaint alleged excessive fees and an unauthorized trade but was “settled to avoid the cost and time of an arbitration proceeding,” according to Mr. Buck's statement from the time on BrokerCheck.
Mr. Buck declined to discuss exactly what questions he was asked at that meeting.
“There were a couple things in there where I said, 'This is the way I do it', and they said, 'Oh, you're not supposed to do it that way,'” Mr. Buck said. “I said, “Thank you, I didn't know that. I'm glad to know. Going forward I'll do this the way it's supposed to be.'”
Mr. Hamburger said advisers who find themselves in that situation should excuse themselves from the meeting and consult with an attorney.
Ultimately, Merrill Lynch officials pointed to a number of problems they said had resulted in “management's loss of confidence” in Mr. Buck, according to his U5 filing, which Merrill Lynch submitted to Finra on Thursday.
Mr. Buck was ultimately terminated because of “conduct including failing to discuss service level and pricing alternatives with a customer, providing inaccurate information to firm management during account reviews regarding this issue, mismarking bond cross-trade order tickets as unsolicited, and providing information to a client during an active account review that did not correspond to the firm's records,” according to the U5.
“The reasons offered by Merrill Lynch are their own,” Mr. Hamburger said.
He and Mr. Buck declined to comment further, saying Mr. Buck was looking to move on. He does not plan to fight the allegations in court, Mr. Hamburger said.
“Tom sees the path ahead of him as far more fruitful than engaging in any battle with his former firm,” Mr. Hamburger said. “The matter is now being closed and Tom is free to move forward and pursue opportunities that he did not even know existed.”
Mr. Buck said he has been working with a recruiting firm but is not sure where he will go next.
He said that he has been interviewing with regional broker-dealers, independent firms and also considering the registered investment adviser model. He said he has narrowed it down to two or three firms and expects to finalize the move next week. His daughters will join him there, he said.
A spokesman for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, William Halldin, declined to comment.
In the meantime, Mr. Buck said he has been avoiding reading news stories and blogs that had speculated reasons as to his termination.
“I'm going through what has been a horrible month,” Mr. Buck said. “I have had very little sleep in the past month.”
