Pasha Azad & Dayne Crist Lead $1.4B Lumina Wealth Partners from Bernstein to UBS Century City as Irvine Hub Consolidates 10 Teams

UBS is engineering a two-front Southern California land grab—lifting out ultra-HNW talent from Bernstein while building the infrastructure to keep those clients sticky. If you're in the LA or Orange County market, your book is in play.

UBS just executed a two-front Southern California offensive: a $1.4 billion Bernstein team lift-out into Century City and a brand-new Orange County hub that consolidated ten advisory teams onto a single floor in Irvine.

Lumina Wealth Partners Brings $11.5M in Production to UBS Century City

Pasha Azad and Dayne Crist, both Managing Directors and Private Wealth Advisors, led the move from Bernstein Private Wealth Management to UBS's Private Wealth Management office at 2000 Avenue of the Stars in Century City. They brought fellow advisors Steven Summerhays and Koby Dardashti with them, forming a four-advisor team now operating under the name Lumina Wealth Partners.

The team manages approximately $1.4 billion in client assets and generates about $11.5 million in annual production, making it one of the more consequential wirehouse lift-outs in the LA market this cycle. Support staff including Ryan Siroky, Lexie Kamran, Alex Day, and Nick Horn also made the jump, meaning UBS captured the full client-service infrastructure—not just the advisors.

Lumina's client base reads like a who's-who of California wealth: entrepreneurs, founders, business owners, executives, artists, entertainers, professional athletes, and multigenerational families. Their specialty in liquidity events and business sales aligns squarely with the deal-heavy Southern California economy, where UBS Private Wealth Management recruiting strategy has increasingly targeted founders sitting on pre-exit wealth.

The Irvine Buildout: Ten Teams, One Floor, One Signal

Simultaneously, UBS opened a new Orange County wealth management hub on the 18th floor of 200 Spectrum Center Drive in the Irvine Spectrum area. This wasn't a soft launch—ten teams relocated into the new space, including Carver & Gee Wealth Management, the Nassau Group, Roth Wealth Management Group, Sequoia Partners, The Callan Group, The Price Group, and the Katzaroff, Kottmeier, Thompson Group, among others.

Consolidating that many teams under one roof is a deliberate infrastructure play. UBS is building the kind of collaborative, resource-dense environment that makes it harder for competitors to cherry-pick individual advisors and easier to pitch institutional-grade service to UHNW prospects. The Irvine office also connects UBS's broader Southern California market structure, which already spans San Diego, La Jolla, Newport Beach, and the Century City PWM office.

What Bernstein Lost and Why It Matters

Bernstein Private Wealth Management doesn't give up $1.4 billion quietly. This lift-out signals that UBS's value proposition—particularly the weight of its Private Wealth Management brand and its Century City office infrastructure, which houses more than 225 employees—was compelling enough to pull a high-producing team out of a firm known for sophisticated investment management.

For advisors watching from the sidelines, the details reported by AdvisorHub confirm what deal watchers have suspected: UBS is willing to compete aggressively for teams that serve the ultra-HNW and UHNW segments, not just accumulate warm bodies. This isn't volume recruiting—it's precision targeting.

The Broader Play: UBS's California Ambitions in Focus

This dual move—Lumina in Century City, ten teams in Irvine—fits a pattern UBS has been building since its 2023 California market restructuring, when it named expanded LA market heads and carved out a dedicated Southern California region. The firm is clearly betting that the LA and Orange County wealth corridors are underpenetrated at the ultra-HNW level and that a stronger physical footprint changes the competitive math.

For advisors at competing wirehouses in the region, that calculation deserves attention. UBS just made itself significantly harder to ignore—and wirehouse advisor recruiting deals in California are only getting more competitive as a result.