&Partners lands its 123rd practice with an $838 million Wells team

The count at &Partners now reads 123, the latest entry a Bellevue, Washington practice that manages $838 million in prehire assets under founders Thomas Faley and Jason Eckerman, both of them from Wells Fargo Advisors. &Partners, the St. Louis hybrid RIA and broker-dealer founded in late 2023, announced the addition late last week, extending a recruiting run that InvestmentNews calls one of the more aggressive in the independent wealth space this year.

Crown Legacy arrived with a five-person leadership core—Faley and Eckerman as founders, Jeni Gonzales as partner and practice director of operations, Ali Boop-Nilsen as wealth management associate, and Sean Price as wealth management director—and a client-service framework it calls G.O.L.D., for guidance, ownership, loyalty and discipline. Faley has been in the industry since 2001; Eckerman began at Ameriprise, according to BrokerCheck records.

The firm was closing in on $60 billion in total assets at the end of July, a run that in June included three teams in a single week carrying roughly $1.6 billion in combined assets and, by mid-July, 117 practices after landing a $524 million team from Raymond James Financial Services. Before that, &Partners crossed 100 advisor practices recruited industrywide with an $827 million team from Wells Fargo Advisors, making No. 123 the latest entry in a pattern that has a name: the alumni channel has become the wirehouse's hardest problem.

David Kowach, an ex-Wells executive who founded &Partners in late 2023, set the recruiting focus squarely on that alumni population, and Faley and Eckerman are products of the same channel. Every practice that follows that path becomes a reference point for the next Wells team weighing a move. The run compounds: each publicized landing shrinks the uncertainty for the team behind it, since if the first 100 could make the jump, the next one can.

The hybrid structure is central to the pitch, because a pure RIA would ask Crown Legacy to give up its broker-dealer license and a pure broker-dealer would push it to abandon the fiduciary platform, while &Partners keeps both—which means Faley and Eckerman can import the G.O.L.D. framework without rebuilding the chassis underneath. That is a meaningful advantage in a recruiting market where integration risk kills more moves than compensation ever does.

Wells Fargo has spent 2026 trying to reverse years of net advisor losses, according to Bloomberg, stepping up recruitment on both the employee and independent sides, with independent advisers—those who use its platform without being full-time employees—bringing in an estimated $17 billion in new assets so far this year on top of $24 billion from full-time hires. Barry Sommers, head of wealth management, has led the turnaround since joining in 2020, and Wells Fargo Advisors head Sol Gindi says the bank now operates at "a fraction of the attrition" it saw five or six years ago when the current leadership team arrived.

Those inflows measure the bank's recruiting engine while leaving out its alumni drain, and PWD's tracking shows disclosed summer departures from the wirehouse now top $5 billion, with the independent channel the destination of choice. The round-robin of independent-channel recruiting has tightened: Raymond James loses a $545 million team, then answers with a Wells Fargo veteran; Ameriprise and Janney take two veteran Wells teams in the same week; a single day of Commonwealth defections showed liftouts have moved from wirehouse exits to rival independent platforms.

That pattern is &Partners' entire model, and the $838 million Crown Legacy book shows why it works: the practice arrived with its own service framework, a named operations director, and a defined leadership structure, so &Partners gets a functioning team and skips the integration work two production-only advisors would require. That is the difference between recruiting assets and recruiting practices, and it is the reason the alumni channel compounds—a cold recruiter persuades a producer to jump, while an alumni network inherits a practice with its operations director and service framework already in place.

Wells Fargo's response has been to out-recruit, and the $17 billion and $24 billion numbers are real—Gindi's public language suggests the internal churn has normalized—but Crown Legacy is a five-person team with a defined operations director and a client-service brand, not a solo producer walking. For a bank trying to hold advisor headcount, that is a different loss. The next Crown Legacy is likely already in Kowach's universe, and it will tell Gindi more about the true state of attrition than any recruiting tally.