Top Merrill brokers credit firm's training program for career success

In an industry known for a spectacularly high dropout rate, advisor training programs can come in for criticism. 

But two brokers on Financial Planning's top 40 under 40 list, Jens Pascucci and Dominic Altobelli of Merrill, say their careers are proof these endeavors remain worthwhile.

Pascucci, who is No. 1 on the ranking for the second year in a row, and Altobelli, who holds the No. 22 spot for 2025, credit Merrill's training program for helping them find their footing and launch successful careers. Pascucci, who works out of the Seattle area, said he came to financial planning after working in the tech industry and deciding it wasn't a good fit.

READ MORE: These are the top 40 brokers under 40 in 2025

Inspired by his grandfather's early retirement at age 50, Pascucci was inclined from childhood to treat money matters seriously. He would put half of his paper route money into savings, buy certificates of deposit and savings bonds in middle school and open an investment account at the age of 14 to trade stocks. 

But later in life, when he was ready to leave the tech industry, Pascucci knew his lack of experience as a financial planner meant that finding a firm with a good training program was paramount.

Merrill trains Wall Street

Merrill has long enjoyed a reputation for "training the Street" and has boasted the most advisors on Financial Planning's top 40 under 40 rankings for six years in a row. Pascucci said he was aware of the firm's training program when he was looking to move into the financial services industry.

But before committing to any company, he made it a point to look through industry publication rankings of advisors and cold-call some planners to see what they thought of various firms.

"I talked with people actually who were at other firms, even who went through Merrill's training program, and spoke highly of it," Pascucci said. "And so that, to me, was a very strong recommendation."

Thirteen years later, Pascucci is producing $12.9 million in annual revenue from a book with $3.2 billion under management. Pascucci said Merrill's 43-month-long training program helped him secure the licensing he needed to work as a broker and paid for him to become a certified financial planner and obtain other certifications. Perhaps most importantly, it gave him access to the firm's market executive in Seattle, who could rattle off the names of the top 25 advisors in the area.

"And in the first three months, I had coffee with all of them, learned about how they built their business and how they managed client relationships," Pascucci said. "I'd love to say I invented everything myself. But I actually took a lot of that knowledge and then used it to put together my own framework."

READ MORE: These are the top 40 regional brokers under 40 in 2025

High dropout rates

Yet success stories like Pascucci's remain uncommon in an industry in which demand for advisory services always seems to outrun the supply. The consulting giant McKinsey estimated in a report this month that the U.S. will be short by 100,000 advisors by 2034, largely driven by a prediction that the number of households with $500,000 or more to invest is increasing by 4% to 5% percent a year.

McKinsey noted the industry's total headcount has meanwhile increased by only 0.3% a year in the past 10 years and predicted it will begin decreasing by 0.2% annually. As many others have noted, advisor retirement is the big culprit. Roughly 110,000 advisors, managing 42% of the assets in the industry, are expected to retire in the next decade.

Training programs could certainly help reverse this trend. But industry recruiters are skeptical of whether the available ones are up to the task.

Jason Diamond, the vice president of the recruitment firm Diamond Consultants, said wirehouses like Merrill and Morgan Stanley are at the forefront of trying to train the next generation of advisors. But that doesn't necessarily mean their training programs are runaway successes; it's just that, aside from training offered by large regional firms like Edward Jones, there isn't a lot of competition.

Diamond said the dropout rates in even the best training programs remain notoriously high — commonly pegged at anywhere from 75% to 90%. If only a small proportion of all aspirants actually go on to become a full-time advisor, then the training programs are doing very little to alleviate the headcount shortage, he said.

"In a lot of these programs, they seem to know what they are doing, and they seem to have the recipe for success and the right formula," Diamond said. "But they still have a long way to go."

Diamond said a high failure rate isn't necessarily a disaster for firms offering training programs. It's often costly to keep advisors around who aren't producing much on their own. And then the firms usually get to keep whatever book of business a departing advisor was able to build before leaving.

Merrill's training program

Exact figures on firms with training programs are hard to come by. Of the big Wall Street fixtures, Merrill is the only one that regularly talks about training in its quarterly earnings calls. 

The Bank of America subsidiary announced plans for a new program, called the Advisor Development Program, in spring 2021 that reduced the training period to 18 months. 

One of its main goals is to reduce the dropout rate. But Merrill executives have yet to release completion figures, in part because the program is still fairly new.

On a call with reporters in January, Merrill Wealth Management president and co-head Eric Schimpf said the firm is training roughly 2,400 advisors. One emphasis of the new program is to feed trainees' leads through Bank of America, which ties into a broader goal of making sure clients have relationships with as many business lines of the bank as possible.

Schimpf last month credited the trainees for helping to bring in roughly a third of the firm's new household relationships in 2024, double the rate for the year before.

"Many of these young advisors will eventually join teams for existing, experienced financial advisors," Schimpf said.

Not enough emphasis on sales?

Rick Rummage, an industry recruiter and the CEO of The Rummage Group, said training programs have erred in recent years by backing away from teaching industry novices effective ways to sell their services. Managers, in part out of a fear of running afoul of regulators, have instead placed the emphasis on making sure new advisors know how to properly construct portfolios and carry out other aspects of financial planning.

The trouble, Rummage said, is that advisors are usually judged by how many new clients and assets they bring in — activities directly related to sales. The result is what Rummage deemed "a lot of knowledgeable failures."

He called for a return to "basics" — such as teaching advisors how to run seminars and become good public speakers, hold client-appreciation events and conduct advertising and marketing campaigns.

"And cold calling — they say that doesn't work anymore because of the no-call lists," Rummage said. "You can't call many residences, but you can still call people's businesses."

A report this month from the research firm Cerulli found that roughly 55% of advisors have a hard time bringing in business from new clients. That's the case even though potential clients surveyed by Cerulli expressed willingness to pay for financial advice. Among affluent respondents, 59% said they would pay to work with an advisor, up from 45% in 2015.

Pascucci said Merrill's training program, at least in its earlier incarnation, provided some invaluable coaching on sales. One of the easiest ways young advisors can lose the trust of a prospective client is to not have a ready answer for a financial planning-related question.

Pascucci said his training involved meeting every other week with a sales manager who would pretend to be his client.

"He had 20 years of experience, so he would know that, a lot of times, clients will ask this," Pascucci said. "That really helps, because in the early stage, I think one of the hardest things in this industry is clients often want to work with people with more experience, but you have to work with people to gain that experience."

Training as a way to learn who can take the heat

Rummage, who ran a training program for Morgan Stanley for a short time in the Washington, D.C. area, said he finds training serves as an efficient way to weed out newcomers who don't want to work long hours or lack the discipline needed to succeed in the business. Those who do make the cut are often placed on teams where they can share a piece of older advisors' books of business and gain greater access to promising leads.

"There's something to be said for bringing someone in and not pairing them up and letting the ones who don't work very hard fail," Rummage said. "And then you take the 10% who are still standing and pair them up with somebody."

Until that point, advisors are often expected to prove themselves on their own. Dominic Altobelli said he, like Pascucci, came into the industry with no family connections and the need for some coaching on how to build a book of business.

Altobelli had enjoyed a run as a professional baseball player, being drafted by the Colorado Rockies and then playing "all over the minor league system." It was an exhilarating time, but he realized it was not something that could last.

Altobelli said he recalls one day when, "I was sleeping on an air mattress with four other guys in Asheville, North Carolina, South Atlantic League, and playing like every other day, and wondering what the hell I'm going to do with my life."

He had met a regional bank executive in the Chicago area — where Altobelli grew up — while coaching youth teams during his offseason. The man had encouraged Altobelli to consider a career in financial services. 

When Altobelli knew it was time for a change, he gave the executive a ring and soon found himself with an internship in the bank's wealth and estate planning group. Like Pascucci, he too went through an industry publication's listing of the biggest firms to devise his next step.

This was in 2012, just a few years after Wall Street had teetered following the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Altobelli said Merrill, which had been acquired by Bank of America just four years before, was one of the few firms still running a training program. 

"Merrill had the most structure," Altobelli said. "A few of the other big wealth advisory firms were starting to hire, but the time frame was really short, I recall, and Merrill's program at the time was a 43-month program." 

The need to join a team

Altobelli said he "probably naively" set out on his own to build a book of business, drawing in those initial years on acquaintances he had met through the baseball world. 

But around the time it was apparent he was going to graduate from the training program and become a full-time advisor, he received some sage advice from an older colleague.

"I'll never forget it," Altobelli said. "He came to my little cubicle and said, 'Hey, let's take a walk.' And we were walking and talking and, and he said, 'You know, I just want to give you advice. Take it or leave it. But if you were my son, I would suggest you might want to start interviewing some teams.'"

Altobelli now calls it probably the "best advice he ever received." He eventually landed at The Scandariatto Group, a large Chicago-based practice where he's one of two managing directors.

Pascucci too eventually found his way onto a team, one that he formed with another advisor. The group now has 15 members.

Pascucci said he of course has benefited from the expertise of the colleagues he has surrounded himself with over the years. But he traces the roots of his success back to Merrill's training program.

"I think to Merrill's credit, it is costly to run," Pascucci said. "All those events, they get us all together, all the trainers, all these other things. It would be very easy to just hire people on commission only and say, 'If you make it, you make it. If you don't, you don't,' and not put a lot of capital into it. And so I think it really is a commitment from the firm, putting in the capital, putting the focus on trainers, in every office."