Wells Fargo & Co.’s Los Angeles wealth and investment management team snagged a dozen top-performing financial advisers last year in Los Angeles, adding billions in managed assets.
The hires are an “exciting growth story” for the fourth-largest U.S. lender, said L.A. market leader Paul Vannuki, despite company-wide job cuts that drove up fourth-quarter severance costs to $612 million. Shares fell by the most in six months after the bank missed analysts’ profit expectations at a Jan. 14 earnings call. The stock closed at $89.25 by the end of the trading day, down nearly 5%.
Though the L.A. Wells Fargo Advisors team nearly doubled its new hires last year compared to 2024, the firm has cut its headcount by more than 50% over the past three years. Chief Executive Charles Scharf told investors in December that the bank will embrace new artificial intelligence technologies to boost efficiency. Amid leaner times, wealth management is a major revenue stream for the bank, and attracting teams working with high-net-worth clients is key, executives said.
L.A. is a “critical market” for investment management, Vannuki said. The 12 L.A.-based advisers Wells Fargo brought in last year, most of whose clients have investable assets of $10 million or more, oversee a collective $6.5 billion in assets. The bank’s new brokers include the Munster Freeman Group and the Broadleaf Group of Century City. The latter, which most recently produced $11 billion in annual revenue from its previous affiliation with UBS Wealth Management, has grown its managed assets to $2 billion from $1.5 billion since joining Wells Fargo in February.
Asset appreciation isn’t the only driver behind that increase, Vannuki said. “They’ve also been able to add clients and increase their wallet share and their market share because of some of the capabilities that we have that didn’t exist at their prior firm,” he said.
Advisers “vote with their feet” as they move companies, and access to an expansive balance sheet is a primary draw, Vannuki said.
