Wachovia Securities’ financial advisors were hit with two major announcements today. The brokerage will not pay its financial advisors a retention bonus and the company will change its name to Wells Fargo Advisors, effective in May.

Withholding the retention bonuses breaks away from a long-standing convention of the wealth management profession, but it was a necessary move for several reasons, said Tony Mattera, a spokesman for Wachovia.

When clients are suffering and seeing the value of their portfolios decline and the word “greed” is routinely used to describe the securities industry, doling out the bonuses no longer seemed right, said Mattera.

“In an environment where these kinds of bonuses are under very close scrutiny, it did not seem like an appropriate thing to do,” he said.

Wachovia Securities’ 16,000 advisors got the news during a company-wide conference call Friday afternoon with chief executive officer Danny Ludeman, Mattera said.

Traditionally paid to keep advisors’ loyalty during the upheavals of a merger, the retention bonus payments seemed unnecessary after the merger with San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, because the bank never maintained a full-blown brokerage unit and therefore faced no integration issues, said Mattera.