Wealth Management Firm &Partners Hits $35 Billion in Assets, Eyes $120 Billion Goal

&Partners, founded by ex-Wells Fargo executives, exceeded its milestone of $25B AUM early this year and has climbed to $35B. With roots in St. Louis and Nashville, &Partners targets $120B within five years.

A wealth management firm founded by former executives at St. Louis-based Wells Fargo Advisors (WFA) reached a milestone early this year of $25 billion in assets under management and the total has climbed to $35 billion (as of June 30, 2025).

Since its launch 21 months ago, &Partners has generated $260 million in revenue and onboarded about 83 financial advisory teams nationwide, said CEO and cofounder David Kowach, a former president and CEO of Wells Fargo Advisors who lives in the St. Louis area. Based in Clayton and Nashville, &Partners is a hybrid broker-dealer and advisory firm.

The other cofounders are Kristi Mitchem, the ex-CEO of Wells Fargo Asset Management who helped steward $550 billion in assets, and John Alexander, who oversaw about 700 branch advisory teams during his tenure at WFA. Mitchem and Alexander are based, respectively, in Florida and Texas.

In 2023, Kowach and his partners acquired Wiley Bros.-Aintree Capital, a Nashville-based broker-dealer and registered investment advisor with $663.8 million in assets, InvestmentNews reported.

The five-year goal of &Partners is to attract a total of 100 to 150 financial advisory teams with about $120 billion in assets under management and $800 million in annual revenue, according to Mitchem. &Partners is an employee- and advisor-owned firm with a broadly distributed equity base, she said. “If you’re asking what the secret sauce is, it’s shared ownership. It creates a very different culture and a very different way of interacting inside and outside of this organization. When we get to that five-year plan, advisors will be the largest group of shareholders of the company. They will own about 45% of the equity, and the rest of it is a mix of home office professionals and third-party investors. And so that gives you a real sense of the distributive nature of the equity and the import that we place on advisors as the primary reason that clients want to do business with &Partners,” she added.

Kowach said &Partners has about 172 people based in the St. Louis area and an office in the Pierre Laclede 1 building at 7701 Forsyth Blvd. in Clayton, and some people working in downtown St. Louis at 10 S. Broadway. The headcount includes the Martin Wright Group that also is in Pierre Laclede 1 and One Private Wealth & Partners in Chesterfield, as well as contractors, Kowach said.

A June 4 press release announcing that &Partners had reached $25 billion in assets under management earlier this year referred to the firm as “St. Louis-based” and also as “based in Nashville, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri.” A filing with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority listed the main office location as Nashville. Kowach said Thursday that the firm is co-located in Nashville and Clayton.

Clearing and custody services are provided to &Partners by National Financial Services LLC, a Fidelity company. &Partners is the enterprise trade-marketing name for Ampersand Partners LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, and its subsidiary, &Partners, LLC, a Tennessee limited liability company registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a broker-dealer and investment adviser.

Reprinted with permission.