UBS breakaway Cleros Wealth launches $3.61B RIA with Elevation Point

A Fort Worth, Texas, advisory team that supervised approximately $3.61 billion in client assets at UBS has broken away to form Cleros Wealth Partners, an independent registered investment advisor backed by a minority investment from Elevation Point.

The launch, announced Tuesday, extends a string of UBS breakaway deals for Elevation Point and adds to the continuing exodus of advisors from UBS’s US wealth business.

Cleros is led by founding partners Kyle Kight, Alex Armstrong and Jamie Packer. The 11-person team operated at UBS as Thompson, Kight, Armstrong & Packer and will custody client assets with Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions.

Read more: Elevation Point expands Goldman Sachs tie-up to broaden services for partner RIAs

The firm works with high-net-worth families and several community-focused endowments and foundations, most with deep roots in Fort Worth and surrounding Tarrant County. More than half of its clients have been with the team for more than two decades, including some relationships stretching past 30 years, according to Cleros.

The partners said going independent would broaden their investment options and help them manage multigenerational wealth transfer.

“Our clients have worked very hard to build significant assets. Independence will strongly position us to continue providing personalized advice and plans for protecting and growing those assets from generation to generation for the benefit of their families and community,” said Kight, who has spent 27 years in the business.

“Elevation Point understands that long-term commitment and respects the unique history and heritage of Fort Worth that shapes our client relationships and how we evolve alongside them,” Packer said.

Elevation Point, a Minneapolis-based minority investor founded in June 2024 by former Sanctuary Wealth CEO Jim Dickson, supplies capital, technology and back-office support to advisors leaving larger firms.

Read more: How Elevation Point is building growth momentum in 2025

In October, the firm took a stake in Truing Capital Advisors, a Las Vegas firm formed by a UBS team overseeing about $750 million. Earlier this year, it backed two Atlanta-area UBS groups, Harbor View Private Wealth and Hampton Bluff Capital Partners, each with roughly $1.3 billion.

In 2025, it supported the launch of Family Office Partners, a $2.5 billion firm in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Loxahatchee Capital, a $1.4 billion multifamily office in Tequesta, Florida.

UBS reported 5,644 advisors in the Americas at the end of June, down 2.2% from a year earlier, and its third-quarter results showed a further dip to 5,601. On the firm’s late-October earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Todd Tuckner downplayed the continued losses in headcount, saying some net attrition is normal for the industry as advisors continue to move to independent firms.

Louis Diamond, managing partner at Diamond Consultants, pushed back against the suggestion in a LinkedIn post last week, citing the consultancy's H1 2026 transition data showing roughly two-thirds of UBS advisors leaving in the first half hopped to another W-2 firm.

"That’s the highest percentage among the four major wirehouses we analyzed, and well above the approximately 51% of departing advisors across UBS, Merrill, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo who made a similar move," he said. "So while independence continues to attract advisors across the industry, those leaving UBS have been more inclined than their wirehouse peers to remain employees."

While he credited UBS for stemming some of the exit pressure – "attrition has improved from the elevated levels we saw last year" – he said UBS advisors coming to Diamond Consultants are also still angsting over compensation changes, certain firm policies, and questions about the direction of the business.

"[W]hen nearly two-thirds of departing UBS advisors choose another W-2 firm, it’s worth asking whether the issue is the employment model or the experience at the firm they’re leaving," he said.