Another former wirehouse leader – Wells Fargo's Jim Hays – lands in RIA world

Add Jim Hays to the long list of senior executives at the top wirehouses who have crossed Wall Street to work with the direct competition, registered investment advisors and RIA aggregators.

Hays was head of Wells Fargo Advisors from July 2019 and retired from the firm in 2022, as the bank, Wells Fargo & Co. was restructuring its wealth and investment management business and leaning heavily on executives from JP Morgan Chase & Co. – including Hays’ replacement Sol Gindi - to do so.

Hays joined IFC Wealth Management, parent company of IFC Advisors, as executive chairman, according to a statement Tuesday from the company. IFC Advisors has $2.3 billion in client assets, according to its most Form ADV.

Hays, like so many of his former senior wirehouse brethren, is back in the financial advice business, but on the other side of the street. RIAs like IFC Advisors directly compete against firms like Wells Fargo Advisors for financial advisors, and wirehouse advisors are the most significant in term of revenue in the industry.

Wells Fargo Advisors, however, is the only one of the four major wirehouses to have an independent broker-dealer and work with RIAs, so Hays taking over the executive chair role at IFC Advisors is far from a stretch, he said in an interview Wednesday. 

“I've always been attracted to businesses that are more entrepreneurial, and that's the independent broker and RIA side," he said. "Also, over the three decades of a career, it makes sense to move from the large organization to a firm like IFC." 

Hays, who started in the securities industry in 1986 and spent 15 years at Wells Fargo and predecessor firms, is not the only senior wirehouse executive now working for the competition.

John Thiel, former head of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, last year launched an RIA, directly competing with his old firm. In November, he announced he was opening Indivisible Partners, based in Clearwater, Florida. And at the start of the year, Thiel, the firm’s founder and executive chairman, said it had recruited its first team of financial advisors, Woodring/LeRoy Capital Advisors.

Thiel embodied the spirit of the old Merrill Lynch, dubbed the Thundering Herd, and who started at the firm in 1989 as a financial advisor, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He rose through the ranks and, from 2011 to 2016, Thiel was head of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management; then he was vice chair of global wealth management and investment management at Bank of America until 2018, when he left the firm.

Greg Fleming, a former senior leader at both Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, is CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management. The firm was a longtime family office that Fleming relaunched in 2018 into the broader wealth management market and, since then, has hired dozens of wirehouse financial advisors.

Other notable and recent startups led by executives who cut their teeth at the wirehouses and are now hiring those same advisors include Sanctuary Wealth, with close to $50 billion in assets, and NewEdge Capital Group, which works with about $65 billion in client assets.