Northwestern Mutual loses $5 billion to OnePoint BFG

PWD's tracking shows Northwestern Mutual lost $5 billion in client assets across two separate teams during the week of September 7, both landing at OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners. Andy Schwartz's $3 billion book went to Bleakley Financial — now operating as OnePoint BFG — on September 7, and the same day Kevin Spahn led an 18-advisor, $2 billion team to the same destination, together representing roughly a quarter of the $19.73 billion that moved across the wealth-teams market that week.

In a week when Morgan Stanley's deepest single loss was the $1.4 billion Caitlin Alcon liftout to UBS in Pueblo, Colorado, Northwestern Mutual's combined outflow came in at more than three times that size, making it the only block of losses this week comparable to an entire wirehouse's attrition. OnePoint BFG added a third team that week when Rebecca Bast's seven-advisor, $400 million Tampa practice joined from Bast Financial Group on September 11, pushing the aggregator's total to $5.4 billion and at least 25 advisors — the week's most concentrated destination among independent aggregators.

Insurance-owned wealth businesses have long been viewed as stickier than wirehouse franchises, partly because advisors sit inside an ecosystem of insurance products and wholesaler relationships — a team leaving means rebuilding the product shelf, not just moving a book. Yet Schwartz and Spahn did exactly that in the same week, at a scale that suggests the breakaway math now clears for insurance-affiliated advisors, not just wirehouse veterans. The Spahn team's size matters as much as its assets: an 18-advisor liftout is a branch, not a practice, and among the other team moves in the data, sizes ran from two to seven advisors. Spahn's group was roughly the size of a small regional office, and it landed intact — OnePoint BFG is taking whole operating units rather than cherry-picking individual producers, which is how aggregators create density in new markets.