(St. Louis Business Journal) - Wells Fargo Advisors, the St. Louis-based brokerage unit of Wells Fargo & Co., continues to make leadership changes because of restructuring and retirements.
John Peluso, the head of WFA’s brokerage clearing operations, First Clearing, is retiring at the end of September after 35 years with the financial services firm, a company spokesperson said. Independent broker-dealers use First Clearing to clear their trades and WFA’s registered investment adviser also is part of First Clearing.
Al Caiazzo, who joined First Clearing in 2004, will succeed Peluso as president. He will report to John Tyers, head of the Independent Advisor Group.
Warren Terry, managing director of the Client Relationship Group Branch Administration team, left his job late last month. Kim Ta, who has been with WFA for 23 years and most recently led recruiting, replaced Terry. She reports to WFA President Sol Gindi, who also is head of the Wealth & Investment Management Client Relationship group.
Rich Getzoff, head of the branch network since 2019, left WFA in June after working at Wells Fargo and Prudential Securities, a predecessor, since 1998. Getzoff had been a division leader until a restructuring earlier this year that reduced the number of divisions from seven to four.
The personnel changes were first reported by Investment News, which reported that: “Wells Fargo Advisors has seen thousands of financial advisors leave the firm to join competitors or retire since 2016.”
Wells Fargo & Co. in May agreed to pay shareholders $1 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the bank of overstating its progress in cleaning up after its 2016 fake-accounts scandal. The bank’s shareholders alleged Wells Fargo and its past leadership misled them about how swiftly they were fixing the governance issues and risk-management systems that failed to prevent the bank from opening up perhaps millions of fake accounts.
The leadership changes come two months after San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. named Barry Simmons as the new head of national sales for WFA. He leads the sales and business development team nationally, adviser recruiting across all channels, branch communications and advisor and client event strategy.
Simmons, who reports to Gindi, is a former managing director and head of the East Division for J.P Morgan Wealth Management.
Simmons’ predecessor is Heather Hunt-Ruddy, who was promoted to president of the Central Division for Wells Fargo Wealth & Investment Management. Based in St. Louis, Hunt-Ruddy is responsible for leading all aspects of business in the 25 states that make up the Central Division that includes Missouri and Illinois. She reports to Gindi.
Last year, executives David Kowach and Jim Hays retired. Kowach, who was head of WFA until 2019, had moved over to work for Mary Mack, then CEO of Wells Fargo’s Consumer and Small Business Banking. Kowach ran branch banking and then was asked to craft a better strategy to connect the bank and the Wealth & Investment Management group. Mack retired in May.
Hays succeeded Kowach as head of WFA in 2019. When Gindi was named to that job in May 2022, Hays, before retiring, worked on restructuring projects under Barry Sommers, who was hired in 2020 from JP Morgan to head the Wealth & Investment Management group.
With just under $2 trillion in client assets as of the second quarter, Wells Fargo Advisors serves investors through locations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Wells Fargo Advisors is a part of Wells Fargo Wealth & Investment Management (WIM), a division within Wells Fargo & Co. WIM provides financial products and services through various bank and brokerage affiliates of Wells Fargo & Co.
Wells Fargo Advisors is the St. Louis region's largest securities broker-dealer, ranked by total capital of $11.69 billion in 2021, according to Business Journal research.
By James Drew
