&Partners' seventh Wells team makes boutique RIAs a credible counteroffer

Bellevue, Washington-based Crown Legacy Wealth became the seventh Wells Fargo Advisors team to join &Partners this year on Friday, the latest move by the boutique RIA platform founded in 2023 by former Wells and Edward Jones executives. The announcement named principals Thomas J. Faley and Jason A. Eckerman, support staff Jennifer E. Gonzales, Ali R. Boop-Nilsen and Sean C. Price, and $838 million in client assets, though a source familiar with the move put the actual figure at $1.4 billion.

The hire is the platform's 123rd since its founding and at least the seventh Wells team taken this year, following groups in Mississippi, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Virginia; those seven teams managed $6.6 billion combined at their prior firms, part of the roughly $60 billion the platform says its recruits ran before joining. If the Crown Legacy number is modest, the cadence is the point.

Wells, with roughly 12,000 advisors, has spent this year on the other side of the recruiting ledger, landing a $6 billion Morgan Stanley team, a $3.1 billion J.P. Morgan team and two UBS teams with $3.3 billion in combined client assets, which makes the drip in the opposite direction worth reading closely. &Partners has been taking teams in the $300 million-to-$1.4 billion range in succession rather than competing with the wirehouse for a single $3 billion group, and the minority-investment M&A initiative it staffed in May with Shawn McGinn—who helped lead the expansion of Wells' independent broker-dealer unit—suggests the platform intends to offer equity on top of transition cash.

Advisors weighing a boutique affiliation can read the same pattern in the Cresset deal that pulled a $4 billion UBS team into a PE-backed RIA and in the ownership-equity math this publication has traced in $1 billion-team moves; platform capital and a seat at the cap table, more than a higher grid, are what move large books.

The gap between the announcement's $838 million and the source's $1.4 billion carries its own caution. AUM is a definition, not a fact; teams and platforms count client assets differently, and the number that goes into a recruiting release tends to be the conservative one. An advisor evaluating a boutique should ask which number the platform would use in the next announcement, because that number determines their value in the deal.