Ater 40 years as a financial advisor with Piper Jaffray/UBS, Gary Petrucci was almost part of the furniture. He was there in Piper Jaffray's Minneapolis branch when they started honoring the firm's top producer of the year, and scooped that prize 14 out of the 20 years it was awarded. And after spending 15 years on the firm's board of directors, he was also there when the firm was bought by Swiss banking giant UBS in 2006, and decided to stick with it through the transition.

So it was a shock to his former colleagues when he made the first move of his career in January this year-to RBC Wealth Management. Petrucci, who oversaw more than $300 million in client assets at UBS and generated over $2 million in fees and commissions, says he fielded plenty of calls explaining his move. "I told them honestly that within six hours of being here I knew I had made the right decision, and I've not been disappointed," he says.

But perhaps even more surprising is that Petrucci was just another example in a string of veteran UBS advisors who have made the jump to RBC over the past eight months (see table on page 24). While UBS is certainly not the only source of RBC's new recruits-of the 246 advisors it has hired since November 2008, 209 came from wirehouses-there have certainly been some notable UBS defections of long-serving, high-producing advisors.

UBS, for its part, has also done a lot of hiring over this period. "UBS continues to recruit and retain high-caliber financial advisors. Our new advisors come from the top two quintiles of their firms," said the firm in a statement. Since January, UBS says that the average financial advisor joining the firm has 60% more revenue and 42% more assets than advisors leaving.

That said, at least 20 UBS advisors and teams with production over $500,000, along with two veteran branch managers, have moved to RBC in the last eight months, according to FINRA filings and RBC press releases.

Petrucci points to UBS's takeover of Piper Jaffray as one reason he left. UBS's management style, with layers of executives and decisions made in its wealth management central command in Weehawken, N.J., imposed on far-flung branches, forced his hand. RBC's structure, on the other hand, feels more to him like that of Piper's.

Still, Petrucci says he liked Marten Hoekstra, UBS's head of Wealth Management Americas, and felt he was open to suggestions that the firm decentralize decision-making and give more authority to the branch managers. "Marten got that but he had so many issues over the past year that he couldn't get it done the way he wanted to," says Petrucci.

These concerns are echoed by other former UBS advisors who made the move to RBC. Mark Dewane, a $1.1 million producer who joined RBC's Phoenix office in May after 24 years with UBS, says he likes the fact that there are just "two human beings" between himself and the CEO-his branch manager and his regional manager.

Dewane says this creates a more "client-centric" culture. "The wirehouses have lost focus on the fact that there is a client and that client happens to have some money, as opposed to: Here is a big pile of cash and coincidently there's a human being attached to it," he says.

His colleague in Phoenix, Joe Di Vito, also a million-dollar producer formerly with UBS, says in addition to the management issues, the negative headlines surrounding UBS were affecting his clients. He joined RBC in March after a decade at UBS, and has moved the majority of his $105 million in client assets with him. He says one client told him that she was so concerned with the bad press that she was planning to move to an advisor her family used at another firm. "She told me she was so relieved when I told her I was leaving, she said: 'It was nothing to do with you, it was the firm,'" says Di Vito. And she wasn't the only one. Di Vito says while he was still at UBS a couple of his clients asked him to wire some of their money to another firm that they felt was more stable. "I'm happy to say I've now wired that back [to RBC]," he adds.

Still it's not all roses for these former wirehouse producers. RBC has been criticized over its technology before, and reportedly faced some big glitches last year when it replaced its in-house system with another platform.

Di Vito acknowledges that it has been difficult learning some aspects of the new technology and has found some processes take longer than they did at UBS. "UBS is a great platform technologically because they have more advisors," he says. But he adds that the product gurus at RBC have already been on the phone asking for his suggestions and he is confident that the firm is committed to continually improving its systems.