Wells Fargo Preps for Wealth Battle After $1B Turnaround

What You Need to Know

The wirehouse wants to lure hundreds of independent advisers to FiNet, says wealth and investment chief Barry Sommers.
Its key rivals — Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS — don’t have an independent option for advisors to go to when they’re looking to leave.

Three years and nearly $1 billion later, Wells Fargo & Co. is finally playing offense in one of Wall Street’s hottest battlegrounds: wealth management.

The banking giant is trying to lure hundreds of independent advisers to join its platform as part of a larger push to expand the firm’s business catering to rich clients, according toy Barry Sommers, who oversees Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management unit. The independent offering is already Wells Fargo’s fastest-growing wealth channel.

“We believe over the next three to five years there’s a significant opportunity to gain a lot of market share,” Sommers said in an interview from Wells Fargo’s offices in New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood.

The moves are a far cry from just a few years ago, when Wells Fargo’s wealth division was hit particularly hard by a series of scandals that have long plagued the bank. Advisers were fleeing by the thousands and, what’s worse, they were taking their lucrative clients with them.

When Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf took the reins at Wells Fargo in 2019, he quickly tagged the firm’s wealth offerings as an area he’d seek to develop. For the turnaround, Scharf turned to Sommers.

The division’s assets under management don’t sit on the firm’s balance sheet, so Wells Fargo can expand in wealth management without running up against a Federal Reserve-imposed asset cap that’s prohibited the firm from growing beyond its size at the end of 2017.

Upgrading Systems

It’s not the first time Sommers and Scharf have set out to improve a bank’s wealth operations: The pair previously worked together at JPMorgan Chase & Co., where they developed a private client offering to serve wealthy branch customers.

After Sommers joined Wells Fargo in 2020, he asked Scharf for $1 billion to invest over multiple years in the beleaguered division, according to person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations.

He then spent the intervening years remaking the unit’s management team, simplifying its structure and upgrading the technology.

“Fixing the place” was step one when he arrived, Sommers said, declining to comment on the precise amount the company invested in the business. The 54-year-old was responsible for everything “from digital account opening to getting rid of fax machines, I mean you name it.”