Cullman/Holt Group, a seven-person UBS team with $1.3 billion, joins Wells Fargo FiNet in Ohio

The second UBS team to leave for Wells Fargo's independent channel this year did not have to build anything on the way out: the Cullman/Holt Group, seven people in Dublin, Ohio, managed $1.3 billion in client assets at the wirehouse before joining Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network through a tuck-in, InvestmentNews reported. Managing director Jeff Cullman and senior vice president W. Bruce Holt lead the group with financial advisor Ben Krajnak producing alongside them, while the other four carry client-service titles—Connie M. Dennis, a team administrator and senior registered client associate; registered client associates Sol Gamertsfelder and Shannon Borton; and client associate Conor Holt. That four of the seven arrive in client-facing support roles suggests the group moved as a full unit rather than as its producers alone, even though the $1.3 billion is reported for the group and the coverage does not break it out by advisor.

Rather than stand up its own registered investment advisor, the Cullman/Holt Group affixed itself to Ascend Advisory Group, the practice chief executive Tony Reilly founded in 2001 with $27 million in assets and had passed $2.5 billion in assets under management by June, twenty-five years of compounding the incoming book now joins without the new team having to build any of it. FiNet president John Tyers treated the hire as a verdict on both halves of the arrangement: "The move of a team of this size and quality is a reflection of the exceptional platform Tony Reilly and Ascend have created and the access to capabilities and solutions available through the FiNet platform," he said.

This is the second UBS team to take that route this year: in April, Touchstone Wealth Partner, a multigenerational team managing more than $2.1 billion, left UBS to affiliate with FiNet, so the two moves together carry more than $3.4 billion in client assets out of the same wirehouse and into Wells's independent arm inside six months. The reporting does not say how the transition is structured or what UBS retains, but it does show a recruiting flow moving in one direction, from the wirehouse to the independent channel.

A wirehouse team that wants out has long faced two choices: build an independent practice and carry the compliance, technology, recruiting and operations itself, or move to another wirehouse and inherit a version of the same grid. The arrangement FiNet is offering amounts to a third option, in which the practice already exists and the incoming team lends it scale, and Ascend is the case study that makes the pitch—Reilly's twenty-five years of infrastructure is a finished product that a $1.3 billion book can buy into rather than start over. For UBS, the loss runs past the assets: a seven-person unit that had learned to work together may be the harder half of a recruiting loss to rebuild, though the coverage gives no detail on what the wirehouse keeps.

Cambridge Investment Research keeps supplying practices to larger platforms, the latest being Lakewood Wealth Management, the three-advisor Ann Arbor team of founder Harrison Kennard, Charles Dobben and Justin Pandy that moved to LPL's broker-dealer and RIA platforms with about $170 million in advisory, brokerage and retirement plan assets, a move this publication reported when it landed. Its client base runs to multigenerational families, healthcare professionals, university faculty, and college athletes paid through name, image and likeness deals; Kennard carries nearly 20 years in the industry, while Dobben and Pandy each hold two years of registered experience, according to their BrokerCheck records.

LPL also took Conte Wealth Advisors out of Cambridge in August, 24 advisors and $1.6 billion in client assets, a deal this publication covered as a lineage play, and the backdrop is LPL's acquisition of Commonwealth itself—in August the firm raised its run-rate cash flow target for that deal by $25 million while projecting advisor retention would climb to 90%. Cetera, meanwhile, signed Fitzgerald Financial Group of Vineland, New Jersey, away from Commonwealth Financial Network: John Fitzgerald's practice serves about 400 households across more than 1,300 accounts and oversees roughly $185 million in assets under administration, with financial professionals Doug Kramer and Gary Bolno and assistant Tatyana Shevchuk joining the transition, and the practice lands in Cetera's Summit Financial Networks community. Commonwealth has shed a steady run of advisors over the past year, and Fitzgerald is the latest.

Cambridge and Commonwealth, built to give advisors independence from the wirehouse model, now supply practices to platforms that sell scale, with LPL and Cetera on the brokerage and RIA side and Wells's FiNet taking the wirehouse teams. The buyers are the platforms that can absorb a book without the seller building anything new. For the departing wirehouse advisers, the pitch that matters is the one Ascend embodies: independence already de-risked by somebody else's quarter-century of construction. Whether FiNet lands a third large UBS team, and whether practices like Ascend want more books folded into theirs, are what the next few months should settle.