Why Wells Fargo’s Highest-Producing Teams Are Choosing to Leave

Wells Fargo is recruiting aggressively, but this selected departure sample shows persistent pressure from independent, hybrid and non-bank platforms.

Wells Fargo Advisors has been bleeding elite advisory teams all year. From January through August 2026, dozens of high-producing practices representing billions in client assets have left the firm for independent platforms, hybrid RIAs, and competing broker-dealers. The departures span both the employee channel and the supposedly independent Financial Network (FiNet), and the pattern reveals something deeper than normal recruiting-cycle churn: a structural rejection of Wells Fargo's platform by the advisors who can least afford to tolerate its limitations.

The 2026 Scoreboard

The following table captures the most significant reported Wells Fargo departures from March through August 2026. These are not small books moving laterally. These are multi-hundred-million and billion-dollar practices run by veteran teams who made deliberate, calculated exits.

Conservative tally from this sample alone: over $8.8 billion in reported departures across 11+ teams in six months.

And this is far from exhaustive. Wells Fargo no longer publicly reports advisor headcount. The last disclosed number was approximately 12,000 total advisors across all channels as of early 2023, and the firm has stopped updating it. According to AdvizorPro's May 2026 advisor movement report, Wells Fargo recorded 44 advisor inflows against 48 outflows that month alone, a net loss of four advisors in a single 30-day window.

Where They're Going

The destinations tell a story. These teams aren't hopping to another wirehouse. They're going independent, hybrid, or to platforms explicitly designed to be the opposite of what Wells Fargo offers.

&Partners has emerged as the dominant recruiter from Wells Fargo in 2026. Founded in 2023 by former Wells Fargo and Edward Jones executives, the firm now counts 123 advisor practices and over $60 billion in total recruited assets as of July 2026. At least seven teams from Wells Fargo joined &Partners in 2026 alone, representing a combined $6.6 billion in prior-firm assets. The firm is backed by a line of credit from Carlyle Group and has hired Shawn McGinn, a former Wells Fargo FiNet executive who helped expand the independent channel, to lead its recruiting push.

That last point bears repeating: the person Wells Fargo trusted to build out FiNet left to recruit against it.

Carson Group picked up the largest single FiNet departure of the year in the $1.76 billion Doyle and Loughman Wealth Management practice. Carson, which manages over $60 billion in AUM, has completed 17 transactions in 2026.

Raymond James continues to attract teams on the strength of its non-bank ownership structure and technology investment, which now exceeds $1.1 billion annually.

LPL Financial led all firms in raw advisor inflows in May 2026 with 117 advisors joining, and has picked off multiple Wells Fargo teams throughout the year.

Why They're Leaving: In Their Own Words

The departing teams have been remarkably consistent in explaining their exits. The themes repeat across geographies and practice sizes.

"We were looking for freedom and flexibility"

When the Rockline Wealth Management team left Wells for LPL earlier this year, a team member was blunt about the motivation. Higher recruiting offers elsewhere would not have changed the decision. The team was not chasing a check. They were chasing operational autonomy.

"Not under bank ownership"

Krawec Wealth Management, upon joining Raymond James with their $470 million practice, cited the depth of resources available at their new firm and made a pointed observation about corporate structure. Raymond James is not under bank ownership, although it owns a bank. That distinction matters to advisors who have spent years navigating the compliance overhead and reputational drag of being affiliated with one of the most heavily scrutinized banking institutions in the country.

"Scale, planning capabilities, and long-term vision"

Brian Doyle, co-founder of the $1.76 billion Doyle and Loughman Wealth Management, left FiNet for Carson Group after only three years in the independent channel. His statement cited the need for capabilities that Wells Fargo, even in its independent channel, could not deliver.

"Seamless experience"

Lee Winters III, who left Wells for Ameriprise with a $160 million practice, specifically called out the integrated technology stack at his new firm. From the CRM system to client-facing capabilities, the new platform was designed to create a more seamless experience. The implicit critique: Wells Fargo's tools were not.

The FiNet Problem: Independence Without Sovereignty

The Doyle and Loughman departure is the most instructive case study in this dataset.

Brian Doyle and Stephen Loughman built their practice at Wells Fargo for over 18 years. In 2023, they made the internal move from the employee channel to FiNet, Wells Fargo's independent contractor platform. FiNet is marketed as the best of both worlds: entrepreneurial independence backed by wirehouse resources. Wells Fargo has heavily promoted FiNet as a retention tool, and the strategy has worked at scale. Since 2020, more than 1,300 Wells Fargo brokers have transitioned from employee channels to FiNet, representing over 10% of total headcount.

But the Doyle and Loughman exit exposes the ceiling of that strategy. After three years in FiNet, the team concluded that the channel did not deliver the autonomy, technology, or enterprise value creation they needed. They left entirely, taking $1.76 billion to Carson Group.

This is the fundamental limitation of the captive independent model. FiNet advisors operate as independent contractors, but they remain tethered to Wells Fargo's legacy broker-dealer technology, centralized compliance grid, and institutional brand. They cannot select their own custodian. They cannot build a custom technology stack. They cannot create genuine enterprise value in their practice because they don't truly own the client relationship infrastructure.

Wells Fargo keeps approximately 15% of FiNet advisors' gross revenue. For that fee, advisors get access to Wells Fargo lending, compliance infrastructure, and brand affiliation. But as one industry commenter on AdvisorHub observed, &Partners is essentially running a modified version of Wells Fargo's old "Profit Formula" affiliation model, the one that was popular with advisors but abandoned because Wells Fargo could not generate enough profit from it. FiNet replaced it with something more profitable for the firm but less valuable for the advisor.

For teams managing hundreds of millions or billions in assets, FiNet increasingly looks like a halfway house rather than a destination. The teams that move to FiNet seeking independence often discover they've traded one set of constraints for a slightly looser version of the same constraints, and they leave anyway. Wells Fargo's internal retention strategy has merely delayed, not prevented, the departure of its most entrepreneurial advisors.

The &Partners Phenomenon

The rise of &Partners deserves its own section because the firm is, in many ways, a direct repudiation of the Wells Fargo model.

Founded by former Wells Fargo and Edward Jones executives who understood the operational pain points from the inside, &Partners has grown from zero to $60 billion in recruited assets in under three years. The firm hires advisors as employees but pays them similarly to independent contractors, offering a greater share of revenue in exchange for advisors covering certain office expenses. It is the model that Wells Fargo abandoned, rebuilt by people who left Wells Fargo to build it.

Wells Fargo has not taken this lying down. In April 2026, a FINRA arbitration panel ordered &Partners and one of its brokers to pay Wells Fargo $1.25 million in a dispute over what Wells called an "orchestrated" departure. A spokesperson for &Partners called the claims "retaliatory and anti-competitive." The advisor in question had moved his practice, which he built with his two sons, because he believed &Partners was simply a better place for them and their clients.

The arbitration outcome has not slowed recruitment. Since that ruling, &Partners has added at least four more Wells Fargo teams representing over $4 billion in assets.

The Bigger Picture

Wells Fargo's CFO Michael Santomassimo has publicly touted the firm's recruiting success, noting that Wells has begun attracting advisors directly from other platforms rather than relying solely on internal FiNet transfers. In early May 2026, Wells recruited teams managing $9.6 billion in combined assets, and the firm has hired at least seven UBS teams managing nearly $6 billion this year.

But the inflows and outflows tell different stories. Wells Fargo is recruiting aggressively, but it is also losing teams that are larger, more established, and more vocal about why they're leaving. The teams coming in are often drawn by competitive recruiting deals and transition packages. The teams leaving are citing structural deficiencies in technology, autonomy, and long-term enterprise value.

The Forbes/Shook rankings scandal has added another headwind. In August 2026, Wells Fargo followed Morgan Stanley in suspending participation in the Forbes advisor rankings program after revelations of a $6 million undisclosed payment to a former editor. For advisors who relied on those rankings for marketing and client acquisition, the suspension removes a tangible benefit of wirehouse affiliation.

Meanwhile, the industry is moving fast. Cerulli Associates projects that advisor headcount at RIAs will grow nearly 12% by 2028, while wirehouse headcount at firms like Wells Fargo will decline by nearly 6%.

The advisors doing the math are reaching the same conclusion, one exit at a time.

Sources: AdvisorHub, InvestmentNews, Financial Planning, FA Magazine, FINRA BrokerCheck, Wells Fargo Newsroom, Carson Group, AdvizorPro, Cerulli Associates