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

Details are emerging about the new firm, &Partners, that a former head of Wells Fargo Advisors, David Kowach, is looking to soon unveil to the marketplace, including its goal to hire 100 "top performing Advisor Partner teams," according to a copy of a presentation about the firm obtained by InvestmentNews.

The firm is also dangling carrots in front of financial advisors, who currently now have more options than ever to work and get paid. &Partners' "compensation is significantly enhanced from the industry norm," according to the presentation.

The identities of the major investors in the new business still remain clouded, as InvestmentNews reported last week, with market sources saying Kowach, who was the head of Wells Fargo Advisors until 2019, has raised $40 million for the new aggregator.

According to the presentation, &Partners will have three founding managing partners: Kowach, John Alexander, another former senior executive at Wells Fargo Advisors, and Kristi Mitchem, the former CEO and head of Wells Fargo Asset Management until 2019.

There are 13 other founding partners, according to the presentation, almost all of whom have extensive work and management experience at Wells Fargo.

Reached via LinkedIn, Alexander declined to comment about the details in the presentation or the date &Partners would officially launch.

Both Kowach and Alexander left Wells Fargo Advisors last year; the former in June and the latter in March. In a broad shakeup of Wells Fargo’s wealth management operations, 2023 has seen the exodus of senior wealth management executives with decades of experience at Wells Fargo and its numerous predecessor firms.

While the new firm's moniker, &Partners, has raised some eyebrows among wealth management executives for its unusual use of the ampersand symbol, the firm clearly thinks the name is a hook.

"At &Partners, we're not named after a person," according to the presentation. "Instead, our name provides a nod to the people who matter most: You & Your Team."

"It's a partnership," the presentation says. "Advisors and employees own the firm."

The financial advice industry is replete with RIA aggregators and roll-ups like the new &Partners, with aggregators steadily gaining traction by buying so-called breakaway brokers, or financial advisors who leave Wall Street banks to work as part of a smaller firm or an independent RIA. And there are plenty of examples of executives leaving a major firm, sitting on the sidelines to wait out their noncompete agreements, then reentering the financial advice industry.

Wells Fargo & Co., the giant bank, has been overhauling its wealth management business for the past few years, consistently plucking talent from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to replace executives like Kowach.