&Partners lands $838 million Bellevue team from Wells Fargo

&Partners has added Crown Legacy Wealth, a Bellevue, Washington-based practice managing $838 million in prehire assets, marking the firm's 123rd advisor practice since its founding almost three years ago.

The addition, announced late last week, extends a recruitment run that has made the St. Louis-based hybrid RIA and broker-dealer one of the more aggressive recruiters in the independent wealth space this year.

Crown Legacy Wealth is led by founders Thomas Faley and Jason Eckerman, alongside partner and practice director of operations Jeni Gonzales, wealth management associate Ali Boop-Nilsen, and wealth management director Sean Price. The team has built its practice around a client-service framework the firm calls G.O.L.D. — guidance, ownership, loyalty and discipline.

Faley and Eckerman were previously affiliated with Wells Fargo Advisors, which tracks with the recruiting focus David Kowach set for &Partners when it was established in late 2023.

Read more: Ex-Wells chief Kowach wants 100 advisors at new firm &Partners

A veteran advisor, Faley has been in the industry since 2001, according to his BrokerCheck record with FINRA. Eckerman has slightly fewer years under his belt, having begun as a registered broker and investment advisor with Ameriprise according to his history on BrokerCheck.

&Partners has been closing in on $60 billion in total assets as of the end of July, a figure that reflects a run of additions over the past several months. In June, the firm picked up three advisor teams in a single week carrying roughly $1.6 billion in combined assets, and by mid-July it had grown to 117 practices after reeling in a $524 million team from Raymond James Financial Services.

Evem before that, &Partners had already crossed a milestone of 100 advisor practices recruited industrywide, a threshold it passed with an $827 million team from Wells Fargo Advisors.

Crown Legacy's move fits a broader pattern that has defined 2026 for the major brokerages. Wells Fargo, in particular, has been trying to reverse years of net advisor losses by stepping up recruitment of both employee and independent advisors, according to reporting by Bloomberg. The bank's independent advisers – those who use its platform without being full-time employees – have brought in an estimated $17 billion in new assets so far this year, on top of $24 billion added by full-time hires.

That push is part of wealth-management head Barry Sommers' broader turnaround effort, one he has pursued since joining the bank in 2020. Wells Fargo Advisors head Sol Gindi said the bank is now operating at "a fraction of the attrition" it saw when the current leadership team arrived roughly five to six years ago.

The Federal Reserve lifted the $1.95 trillion asset cap it had imposed on Wells Fargo following its 2016 fake-accounts scandal in June 2025, a restriction that had constrained the bank's growth for more than seven years. That regulatory clearance has given Wells Fargo more room to compete for both deposits and advisor talent, though the bank's roughly $2.4 trillion wealth-management business still trails Morgan Stanley's much larger footprint.

Read more: Fed ends Wells Fargo's asset cap restriction, opening long-blocked path to growth

Hybrid firms like &Partners have been direct beneficiaries of that churn as more captive advisors move to the independent space. According to estimates by Cerulli, the share of total industry advisors operating in the hybrid RIA channel will grow at an annual pace of roughly 13.5% in the five-year period ending in 2029, while its share of assets is set to expand at a rate of 11.2% to 13%.