Wells Fargo nabs $6.3B UBS superteam as recruiting race intensifies

Wells Fargo Advisors has recruited its largest team of the year by assets, adding a $6.3 billion group from UBS in a move that underscores both its recruiting momentum and the pressure on rivals over compensation and platform issues.

Hingham Street Partners, founded in 2012 by Peter Landry, Lawrence DePaulis and Timothy Fortune, joined Wells Fargo Advisors’ private client group on December 2, the wirehouse giant revealed on Wednesday.

The multigenerational team, headquartered in Boston with additional offices in Connecticut, Florida and Tennessee, generates $38.5 million in annual revenue and includes 16 advisors supported by 16 staff, with an average advisor tenure of more than 26 years.

The team has been included in Barron’s Top 250 Private Wealth Teams ranking for the past four years and has been ranked the number one Forbes Best-In-State High Net Worth Wealth Management Team for the past three years.

Barry Sommers, chief executive of wealth and investment management at Wells Fargo, framed the move as part of a broader effort to build out a platform for larger ensembles, highlighting Wells Fargo Advisors' appeal to “elite advisor groups who want scale, flexibility, and the resources to elevate their business.”

The Hingham Street hire follows a string of billion-dollar-plus recruits to Wells Fargo Advisors this fall. In October, it added the Kang, Dime, Tran, Osborne Group in Bellevue, Washington, a four-advisor team from Merrill Lynch with nearly $1 billion in combined assets and liabilities and 75 years of collective experience. Last month, it brought on the Munster Freeman Group, another former Merrill team managing about $3 billion in client assets, now based in Manhattan Beach, California, with offices in Arizona and Colorado.

Timothy Grumley, market leader for New England and Upstate New York, said Hingham Street Partners’ “multigenerational approach and commitment to personalized service” fits with the firm’s push to “deliver exceptional experiences” for clients.

Wells Fargo’s recruiting run comes as it leans on a steady pay grid and targeted incentives to keep and attract advisors. The private client group’s 2026 compensation plan revealed in September keeps its $13,500 monthly production hurdle and 50% payout above that mark unchanged for a fifth year, while adding strategic sweeteners such as recurring trail payouts on checking balances, higher credits for annuity business, and boosted payouts on multigenerational accounts tied to households with at least $5 million in assets.

The backdrop at UBS, meanwhile, has been far more turbulent. After the firm cut certain bonuses and squeezed lower producers on its grid, it reported a 3.8% year-over-year decline in advisor head count in the Americas and a net loss of 111 advisors in the second quarter.

The wirehouse has attempted to soothe the apparent angst in its advisory pool with a promise of targeted increases to some advisors' pay, with specific conditions attached to those boosts. But at least one industry observer described the move as "too little, too late," asserting that rebuilding trust and morale would take a more dramatic like a five-year commitment to not disrupt the payout grid for five years.

“Each year, the firm seems to have no respect for such changes, or that advisors want control of their destinies,” industry recruiter Danny Sarch told InvestmentNews in September. “Imagine wondering every September or October what you were going to get paid the next year.”