Wells Fargo attracting advisors to fast-growing indie channel
Three years and nearly $1 billion later, Wells Fargo & Co. is finally playing offense in one of Wall Street’s hottest battlegrounds: wealth management.
The banking giant is trying to lure hundreds of independent advisers to join its platform as part of a larger push to expand the firm’s business catering to rich clients, according to Barry Sommers, who oversees Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management unit. The independent offering is already Wells Fargo’s fastest-growing wealth channel.
“We believe over the next three to five years there’s a significant opportunity to gain a lot of market share,” Sommers said in an interview from Wells Fargo’s offices in New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood.
The moves are a far cry from just a few years ago, when Wells Fargo’s wealth division was hit particularly hard by a series of scandals that have long plagued the bank. Advisers were fleeing by the thousands and, what’s worse, they were taking their lucrative clients with them.
When Chief Executive Charlie Scharf took the reins at Wells Fargo in 2019, he quickly tagged the firm’s wealth offerings as an area he’d seek to develop. For the turnaround, Scharf turned to Sommers.
The division’s assets under management don’t sit on the firm’s balance sheet, so Wells Fargo can expand in wealth management without running up against a Federal Reserve-imposed asset cap that’s prohibited the firm from growing beyond its size at the end of 2017.
It’s not the first time Sommers and Scharf have set out to improve a bank’s wealth operations: The pair previously worked together at JPMorgan Chase & Co., where they developed a private client offering to serve wealthy branch customers.
After Sommers joined Wells Fargo in 2020, he asked Scharf
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