The latest recruiting push is focused on attracting so-called independent advisers, those who aren’t full-time employees of the bank but use its infrastructure. Those advisers have brought in $17 billion so far this year, on top of the $24 billion that new, full-time advisers have added.
The hiring spree has helped offset the flood of departures that’s beset Wells Fargo and its peers as new technology makes it easier for advisers to strike out on their own. It marks a sea change from just a few years ago, when full-service brokerages run by big banks were the primary homes for financial advisers.
Gianluca Palermo, a managing partner at Infinity Private Wealth on Long Island, left Bank of America Corp. earlier this year to join Wells Fargo as an independent adviser, along with his $1.8 billion of client assets. “I have all the tools at my disposal, but nobody is telling me what to do with my clients,” Palermo said in an interview.
James Taylor brought over his team and nearly $6 billion of client assets from Morgan Stanley in May. “I think that’s been great that Wells has been skating to where the puck’s going,” Taylor said. Wells Fargo offered a spot to land where he won’t have to change banks again if he wants to go independent in the future, Taylor said.
It’s part of Wells Fargo wealth-management head Barry Sommers’ major revamp of the bank’s wealth-management business since he was recruited in 2020 by Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf, his old boss at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Instead of fighting the trend toward independent advisers, Sommers set out to make it easier for them with the help of his bank.
“We’re always going to be constantly improving our platform, but we have all the right products and services, the right technology, and we’re focused now on growing this business,” Sommers said.
While Wells Fargo still has a ways to go to catch up to competitors — its $2.4 trillion wealth-management business is dwarfed by Morgan Stanley & Co.’s $8 trillion juggernaut — the recent hires mark a sea change from when Sommers started.
Back then, Wells Fargo’s reputation was battered by a series of scandals that prompted thousands of advisers to leave. The scandal that began with the revelation of thousands of fake accounts exposed weaknesses in risk controls and governance, and the Federal Reserve imposed an unprecedented cap on the bank’s asset growth for years. The Fed lifted the cap last year.
“We’re at a point now where we’re at a fraction of the attrition that we’ve had when we got here five or six years ago,” said Sol Gindi, head of Wells Fargo Advisors, the bank’s brokerage subsidiary.
To vault its wealth-management business into a league closer to Morgan Stanley’s, the bank will need to have advisers who can also help pull in deposits and lending opportunities, according to Will Trout, director at Datos Insights.
“Wells Fargo has a massive balance sheet and now has the asset cap off, but actually embedding that into the adviser workflow and experience takes time and cultural change,” Trout said.
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