Rockefeller adds Truist's $6.2 million Piedmont Wealth Partners team in Charlotte

A three-advisor team producing $6.2 million in annual revenue left Truist Bank for Rockefeller Global Family Office this week, according to AdvisorHub, which attributes the production figure, the move and the $1 billion the team managed at Truist to a source familiar with it. Piedmont Wealth Partners—Paul S. Irving, Gavin Y. Shuck and Brett T. Schmidt, with support staff Nichole McKeon and Ben Beeson—is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and reports to Kristen Sario, Rockefeller's Southeast regional president.

All three principals reached the bank through the BB&T side of the house, Truist's brokerage predecessor. Irving's 28-year career ran through Ameriprise and Wells Fargo before he landed at BB&T in 2013; Shuck started at PaineWebber in 1997 and reached BB&T in 2012 by way of Wells; Schmidt has spent all 14 years at BB&T and Truist. The only principal with no other firm on his record left anyway, which means a long bank tenure is not much of a retention tool, and a practice assembled inside one institution can still walk out whole.

On production alone the team is not a headline recruit: divided three ways, $6.2 million comes to roughly $2.1 million per principal, well under the $10 million production minimum UBS attached to a 16-year package paying 550% of revenue for a two-advisor Merrill Lynch team, as this publication reported in September. Rockefeller's terms for Piedmont are not disclosed. The team's real asset was portability—three advisors, two staffers and the client relationships they share, arriving as one unit rather than in pieces.

Earlier this year another $1 billion Truist team left, in that case for an independent practice affiliated with Wells' Financial Network in Florida—the same size book, and a different answer to the same question. Rockefeller Global Family Office runs family-office, investment management and investment banking units, reported $224 billion in client assets as of June 30, and is backed by Viking Global Investors and a mix of family offices. The source says it has added 15 teams in the past six months, among them two teams with $950 million combined from Stifel and Morgan Stanley this month and, in August, a $550 million Morgan Stanley team and a $2 billion Merrill team.

For advisors weighing the same call, the leverage sat in the unit that could move intact—three producers, two staffers and the book they share—rather than in any one producer's number. Two $1 billion Truist teams have now left in 2026, one for independence and one for Rockefeller. Schmidt, whose 14 years have all been BB&T and Truist, begins his fifteenth somewhere else.