Wells Fargo tops big recruiting week with $6.3B team

Hingham Street Partners left UBS this week to join Wells Fargo’s private client group, the firm’s channel for direct employees. With $6.3 billion under management and nearly $39 million in annual revenue, the 16-advisor team is easily among the largest UBS has lost in a year marked by a stream of big departures.

Hingham Street Partners was founded in 2012 in Boston by the advisors Peter Landry, Lawrence DePaulis and Timothy Fortune. Phil Waxelbaum, the founder of the recruiting firm Masada Consulting, said the three and others at the firm “are amongst some of the most highly respected financial advisors in greater New England.”

Waxelbaum said the team was no doubt courted by many firms.

“This was a highly competitive recruitment,” he said. “And Wells Fargo prevailed in both providing the diverse resources that were needed for each team member, as well as the economic incentive to join.”

Waxelbaum said Hingham Street Partners has a distinct organizational structure that allows advisors to manage their own books of business while being able to draw support from a team of non-client-facing specialists. The firm’s website advertises expertise in topics ranging from tailored portfolios, estate and tax planning and retirement to business valuations and insurance and risk mitigation.

The firm lists its clients as including “executives, business owners and families,” adding that it provides “institutional consulting for corporations, nonprofits and family offices.”

“What they get is they get a bespoke firm and highly professional support,” Waxelbaum said. “It gives them a capacity to attract ultrahigh net worth clients and maintain those service relationships at the highest possible level.”

The three founders of Hingham Street Partners all got their start in the industry at Merrill. Landry was at Merrill from 1998 to 2006, when he left to join UBS; DePaulis was there from 2004 to 2006 before leaving for a short stint at Athena Capital Advisors and then joining UBS in 2008; and Fortune was at Merrill briefly in 2000 before quickly leaving for Smith Barney and then going to UBS in 2009.

UBS has struggled to retain large advisor teams since it announced various modifications to advisor compensation policies in late 2024. Although UBS said this year that it will roll back some of the changes in 2026, advisors have continued to head for the exits.

Before its new pay policy this year, UBS had used what it called a Combined Team Grid, which allowed wealth managers on advisory teams to be paid out a percentage of the group’s total production. That grid was replaced with one that allows advisors on a team to receive payouts set as a percentage of the revenue generated by only the highest-producing member. 

Waxelbam said the Hingham Street Partners team was clearly “a casualty of UBS’s frenetic treatment of advisors.” 

“This is a team that, had UBS stayed the course, would have probably stayed with UBS for the balance of their careers,” he said. “This was not a team that was unhappy with the UBS service model. What they were unhappy with is the lack of consistency in leadership.”