There has been a shuffling of the deck in our comparative compensation chart (pages 30 and 31) this year. The chart, compiled by compensation expert Andy Tasnady, shows you the pay you can expect from all the firms at a your level of production.

This year, UBS instituted a new growth bonus that rocketed it to the top of the heap for $1 million producers. Last year, it was last.

Meanwhile, RBC Wealth Management boosted its cash payouts to help advisors through the down market and worked its way off the bottom of our rankings as well.

Other firms also have tweaked their grids in various ways, but Morgan Stanley Smith Barney's compensation gurus were arguably the busiest on the Street this year. Faced with combining the grids of two wirehouses, MSSB has produced a grid that contains features of both plans-as well as a nice payout boost for its mega-producers.

Morgan Stanley

The compensation team at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (Headquartered in New York City, with 18,135 advisors) had a big task this year, reconciling two cash grids, as well as various deferred payouts and awards-all without getting their advisors' noses out of joint.

The result? Advisors at the top end at least should be pretty pleased. The new firm adopted Smith Barney's higher payout for big producers: 45% for advisors producing $2.5 million-plus (Morgan Stanley paid a maximum of 44% for $3 million-plus producers) and 44% for the $1 million to $2.5 million range (Morgan Stanley was at 43%). It also boosted the top grid rate for advisors doing $5 million-plus from Smith Barney's old level of 45% to 47%. Morgan Stanley's grid previously maxed out at $3 million-plus in production.

Andy Tasnady, an industry compensation consultant, says the new firm did a good job combining the two grids. But, he says, one feature it excluded was Smith Barney's old company match of 33% on voluntary deferred compensation. "A lot of Smith Barney brokers made a lot of money out of that over the years," he says. "That's before the share price tanked, of course."

The other major change in the combined grid is the move away from Morgan Stanley's old two-tiered grid with payouts varying depending on the type of product sold. Scott Smith, an associate director at Boston-based Cerulli & Associates sees the move partly as a reaction to the recent regulatory efforts to bring all advisors under a fiduciary standard of care.

"An independence of products is a step toward a fiduciary environment," he says. "It may be more profitable for the firm for their advisors to sell one product over another, but they have to move away from those conflicts of interest."

To see Morgan Stanley's pay scale, click here.

UBS

As mergers and acquisitions transformed Wall Street last year, UBS's 7,084 advisors had to sit by and see their colleagues pick up attractive retention awards just for staying in their seats. While Weehawken, N.J.-based UBS insists that it has not given its own advisors a retention award this year, its new GrowthPlus award has been a nice bonus for its brokerage force, and is the biggest change in its grid this year. It has also vaulted the firm into first place among wirehouses for $1 million producers in our comparative chart. For the past four years it has ranked last.

GrowthPlus is awarded to all advisors earning at least $500,000 who have spent at least five years at UBS, and ranges from 2% to 9% of trailing-12 production. The bonus is spread out over eight years, from 2010 through 2017, but a large portion is paid upfront.

For example, an advisor producing $500,000 with five years length-of-service would receive an additional 2% payout per year. The firm will payout the first six years upfront in two payments-the first in March 2010 and the second in February 2011. Advisors then receive another payment in January 2014 and the final payment in the first quarter of 2018. The bonus is amortized over the period and if an advisor leaves the firm early, he must repay the difference.

Matt Levitan, director of compensation at UBS, says the creation of the bonus received a lot of input from the advisors themselves. In response to their concerns about the initial proposal, the firm upped the upfront payment to six years from four. It also sped up the first payment to this March from December 2010.

Lower producers were also given an incentive to boost their production. Even if they aren't at $500,000 now, they have three years to reach that hurdle and still qualify for the award.