LPL recruits $1.1 billion Praxis team from Wells Fargo's FiNet

LPL Financial will add a $1.1 billion advisor team to its broker/dealer and RIA platform, lifting Praxis Financial Partners out of Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network — the independent channel Wells Fargo has been building up even as it prepares a fee-only custody platform of its own. The four advisors — Scott Christian, Cecil Loyd, Jay Gentry and Matt Dion — bring support staff with them, according to an announcement from the firms, and their Alpharetta, Ga., practice, which serves business owners, corporate retirees, executives and multigenerational families across 24 states, considered more than a dozen options before settling on LPL.

Christian and Loyd launched the practice in 2013 and named it after the Greek word for "process" to signal a planning-based approach; Gentry arrived in 2020 after 20 years in asset-management distribution, and Dion joined in 2024 after 15 years as an advisor. BrokerCheck lists Dion as the group's longest-tenured Wells advisor at about 16 years, ahead of Christian and Loyd at 13 and Gentry at six.

Four advisors carrying $1.1 billion works out to roughly $275 million apiece, which suggests a book built on a comparatively small number of large relationships rather than a wide retail base. LPL won the practice on a pitch of scale plus autonomy, with Christian saying in a statement that "LPL's open architecture platform gives us the freedom to build the wealth management ecosystem we believe best serves our clients" and Dion adding that "we were looking for a partner committed to innovation and focused on helping advisors deliver greater value." The firm said it chose LPL in part because the platform offered resources and scale while letting the advisors keep ownership of the business, the distinction between a recruiting move and a book sale.

The move lands at an awkward point for Wells Fargo, which has used FiNet as a steady draw for large wirehouse teams and is preparing a revamped, fee-only RIA custody platform it intends to seed with some FiNet advisors by the end of this year before extending it to outside advisors in 2027, according to firm executives. Praxis leaves before that platform reaches the market, carrying an Alpharetta practice that already ran on an independent model to a competitor whose channel now competes for exactly this kind of team.

Wells plays the same game from the other side of the table: in August, FiNet took two California teams worth $545 million, one beat in what this publication has described as a round-robin among the independents that reads less like a talent war than a transfer market. LPL, meanwhile, has been recruiting out of Wells for its own platform build, including the hire of the bank's technology chief to run engineering for its Latitude effort.

LPL brings scale few independents can match, with $2.6 trillion in brokerage and advisory assets, more than 32,000 affiliated financial advisors and the wealth-management practices of about 1,100 financial institutions as of its most recent figures. The RIA channel is not broken out of those totals in the announcement; WealthManagement.com reports LPL did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the asset or advisor count in that channel.

The recruiting market that produced this move has sorted itself into team liftouts and block trades rather than solo breakaways, with LPL, Osaic and Cetera all pushing RIA and fee-based options at advisors and the flow running one way for several years. What sets Praxis apart is where it started: a team leaving one independent channel for another, at a moment when its origin firm is spending to keep precisely that traffic.

Wells' answer to the liftout market — a fee-only custody platform built for its own advisors — is still under construction, seeded by FiNet practices through the end of the year and closed to outside advisors until 2027. Praxis, already running independent, found what it needed somewhere else first.