NewEdge Wealth, a $16.5 billion registered investment advisor owned by NewEdge Capital Group, added two breakaways from the wirehouses on Friday, including a South Florida-based team from Merrill Lynch and a Pennsylvania team from Morgan Stanley.

NewEdge Wealth establishes its third Florida location with the addition of an eight-person team from Merrill, boosting the RIA’s ability to work with Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Palm Beach Garden clients. Previously, they were part of a team that managed $1.3 billion in assets, according to a Forbes.com 2024 analysis of Best-In-State Wealth Management Teams.

Related: $580M Texas Team Joins NewEdge Advisors From J.P. Morgan

Partners Blaine Minton and Kirsten Tuzzo will lead the Florida-based firm. They’re joined by Scott Graver, principal for wealth strategy; Sebin Skaria, vice president, investment solutions; Client Service Associates Maria Maloney and Diane McClung; Client Service Analyst Kelsey Navickas; and Austin Tuzzo, an analyst for investment solutions and Kirsten Tuzzo’s son.

Minton has over 25 years in the industry, with previous stints as a managing director at Merrill and a senior vice president at Morgan Stanley. Tuzzo has worked in the industry for over three decades, including managing the Rockefeller Foundation Endowment portfolio. In addition to being a managing director at Merrill, she was a portfolio management director at Morgan Stanley with other stints at JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.

Related: Alex Goss: NewEdge Capital To ‘Ramp Up’ M&A

In addition, a four-person team in Allentown, Pa., is moving to NewEdge from Morgan Stanley. The team managed about $514 million at the wirehouse, according to the same Forbes.com analysis. They’ve chosen Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions as their custodian. 

The Allentown team is led by Paul Emrick, a principal at the firm, and includes Vice President and Portfolio Strategist Matt Mongon and associates Monica Dougherty and Nathan Emrick (Paul Emrick’s son). The advisors specialize in ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices and institutional clients.

Emrick, who led a private wealth management team at Morgan Stanley for more than a decade, also previously held senior roles at JP Morgan Private Bank and MFP Strategies. Before his career in financial services, he was commissioned through the Army ROTC program at West Chester University and served on active duty in the U.S. Army as a field artillery officer, primarily with the 3rd Infantry Division in Germany.

Mongon joined Morgan Stanley in 2018 following a senior position managing Lehigh University’s $1.6 billion endowment fund. He also previously worked at MFP Strategies.

NewEdge Wealth has 13 offices, including those in Atlanta, Nashville and San Francisco. The firm launched in 2020 and is part of NewEdge Capital’s broader ecosystem of two RIAs and a broker/dealer. NewEdge Wealth predominantly works with ultra-high-net-worth families with $25 million and more in assets, while NewEdge Advisors operates as a more conventional independent channel.

In February, NewEdge Capital Co-Managing Partner Alex Goss told WealthManagement.com the company was planning to “ramp up” M&A activity after building its infrastructure to accommodate quicker integrations. 

“You’re going to see an increase in M&A activity, but not necessarily because we’re finally hitting our stride,” he said. “It’s because we purposely made sure we were going to be ready for that volume that we have knocking on our door to be integrated in an effective manner.”

Since then, NewEdge has brought in numerous firms, with the whole company recruiting advisors with nearly $5.5 billion in assets this year alone. In June, NewEdge Advisors acquired several teams, including a $540 million Michigan-based team from Carson Group and a $580 million Texas team from J.P. Morgan.