LPL lands $1.1 billion Georgia team from Wells Fargo's FiNet

LPL Financial said Monday that Praxis Financial Partners, an Alpharetta, Georgia practice with about $1.1 billion in advisory, brokerage and retirement plan assets, has joined its broker-dealer and registered investment advisor platform, departing Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, the independent contractor channel that has now appeared on both sides of the recruiting market's traffic inside two months.

The same week FiNet lost Praxis, Wells Fargo's employee advisor channel reported a gain of its own when Andrew, Jonathan and Christian Strong joined Wells Fargo Advisors as Strong Wealth Management Group, a three-generation family practice in Naples, Florida, that managed approximately $410 million at UBS. Andrew and Jonathan are brothers, and the coverage is silent on where Christian sits in the family line; the two moves together put $1.51 billion of client assets in motion in one week, about 2.7 dollars in LPL's direction for every dollar that landed at Wells Fargo.

Praxis is a planning practice by name, taken from the Greek word for process, and Scott Christian and Cecil Loyd started the firm in 2013 before Jay Gentry joined in 2020 after 20 years in asset management distribution and Matt Dion came aboard in 2024 with 15 years of advisory experience. The four advisors serve business owners, corporate retirees, executives and multigenerational families across 24 states, with a support bench the announcement names in full: Jody Smith, Zac Hirschler, Ashlyn Presley, Ellen Rick, Seleena Harris and Parvathy Eashwaran.

The reasons Praxis gave for the move are the ones LPL has spent the year building its pitch around: Christian said the planning tools, the flexibility and the ability to build the firm's own technology stack would help it keep delivering service while positioning for growth, and Dion said the team wanted a partner committed to innovation that could improve the client experience without giving up personal service. The announcement says Praxis evaluated more than a dozen firms before choosing, a field wide enough to suggest how many platforms will chase a practice of that size.

LPL's technology story has been the pitch for a while, and in August the firm hired Wells Fargo's technology chief, Jonathan Lewis, as chief technology officer, a bet that platform engineering is becoming the next retention weapon. Praxis is that argument at retail scale: a practice that settled on open architecture and control of its own stack, the profile Marc Cohen, LPL's chief growth officer, pointed to when he said the firm was "honored" to support Praxis in its next chapter because of its collaborative investment process and multigenerational client relationships.

The quieter part of the purchase is that the shift preserves Praxis's independence and keeps future succession options open, which the announcement describes as an increasingly decisive factor for advisors choosing a home. A firm founded in 2013, with four advisors and a named staff bench, is buying a place to run its own succession on its own schedule, and platforms that can promise continuity are selling something a headline recruiting number does not cover.

FiNet has moved in both directions this fall: in late August the channel added two California teams while Raymond James lost $545 million and answered by hiring a Wells Fargo veteran, and this week the ledger reads the other way, with FiNet losing a four-advisor practice, support staff included, and LPL gaining one. What the origin firm gives up is not only the asset total but a practice with a defined planning process, a multigenerational client base and a team that moved together, which is harder to backfill than a single producer's departure.

At the parent level the week came closer to a wash, because FiNet is the independent contractor channel and Wells Fargo Advisors is the employee wirehouse, drawing from different populations and busy enough that one week's traffic settles little. PWD's tracking shows 87 Wells Fargo items as of Oct. 4, a mix of gains and losses that keeps the number climbing.

The Strong hire is the more revealing of the two for what it is: a three-generation family practice arrives with the generational handoff already underway and lands in the employee channel rather than the independent one, carrying $410 million that came out of UBS. Recruiting a practice whose next generation is already in the room is a different proposition from recruiting a single advisor, though the coverage does not disclose terms for either move.

The announcements disclose assets, headcount and the reasons the teams gave, but they leave out price: no transition terms, no compensation arrangements, no deal structures. In a market where the recruiting offer functions as the price signal, the week's public record is $1.51 billion in motion and a winning platform whose terms went undisclosed.

Part of Praxis's $1.1 billion is retirement plan assets, and the coverage does not break out how much or what kind. Platforms have been building advice and distribution channels around held-away retirement money, which makes the plan piece of this book the part to watch.