&Partners' alumni edge lands another Wells team

&Partners, the hybrid broker-dealer and RIA launched by three former Wells Fargo executives in 2023, has added Crown Legacy Wealth, an $838 million Bellevue, Wash.-based team from Wells Fargo, Financial Advisor Magazine reports.

The team was led by founders and managing directors Thomas Faley and Jason Eckerman, who had been with Wells Fargo for a decade, according to the report, and moves with support staff Jeni Gonzales, Ali Boop-Nilsen and Sean Price. Faley began his career in 2001 with IDS Life Insurance and Ameriprise before joining Wells in 2016; Eckerman, whose résumé includes Ameriprise, Chase Investment Services and J.P. Morgan Securities, also landed at Wells in 2016, according to BrokerCheck. &Partners said Crown Legacy's focus on concentrated wealth, tax strategy and legacy planning aligned with its own values.

The addition is the 123rd advisor practice to join &Partners since its founding, and the Nashville- and St. Louis-based firm had $60 billion in assets as of the end of July. Its three principals—David Kowach, John Alexander and Kristi Mitchem—are themselves Wells Fargo alumni. That background is likely more than a footnote: an independent firm run by former wirehouse executives can make the case for leaving in the language of the people it is trying to move, and the hybrid structure matters on the selling side too, since a wirehouse team can keep a familiar brokerage wrapper while gaining an RIA arm—a softer landing than a full jump to fee-only.

The move extends a summer pattern in which Wells Fargo has been recruiting on both sides of the independence line, pulling breakaway advisors onto its own platform while its teams depart for independents. In August alone, a pair of veteran Wells teams took a combined $580 million to Ameriprise and Janney, and a $160 million breakaway was disclosed a day earlier, per PWD's records. The wirehouse's alumni are now running the competing pitch.

The independent channel has long competed on payout and autonomy; &Partners adds institutional memory. Its principals know how Wells Fargo evaluates teams, what a departing advisor gives up, and what it takes to make the leap feel safe—a recruiting advantage no compensation grid can fully offset. For Wells Fargo, the real cost of this move is not the $838 million but the demonstration that its alumni network is now a recruiting channel of its own, operating on a schedule the wirehouse does not control. Crown Legacy is the 123rd proof point, and the names on the door—Kowach, Alexander and Mitchem—are former Wells Fargo management selling a route they have already traveled.