Wells Fargo hires another JPMorgan alum to head wealth management

Wells Fargo continued to overhaul its executive ranks Wednesday with the hiring of a new head for its wealth and investment management unit.

Barry Sommers will join the $1.9 trillion-asset bank on Monday and report to CEO Charlie Scharf. He will have responsibility for wealth management, investment, and retirement products and services.

Bloomberg

Sommers spent most of the past decade at JPMorgan Chase, where he eventually became CEO of wealth management. He left the New York-based bank in April 2019, reportedly retiring to pursue other interests.

Earlier in his career, Sommers held a variety of roles at JPMorgan, including separate stints as head of the company’s consumer bank, Chase Wealth Management and J.P. Morgan Securities. He joined JPMorgan Chase from Bear Stearns in 2008 amid the rescue of the latter firm.

“Barry is a proven leader with deep experience in wealth management,” Scharf said in a press release Wednesday. “He knows asset management, brokerage and private banking intimately and also what it takes to build a successful wealth management business inside a large bank.”

Sommers is the latest in a series of former JPMorgan executives to be hired by Scharf, who joined Wells Fargo last fall. Scharf is a onetime protege of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Wells Fargo announced its intention to hire a new CEO for its wealth and investment management unit back in February.

The job became available because of a reorganization in which Wells Fargo split its wholesale banking unit in two, and Jon Weiss, who previously headed wealth and investment management, was chosen to lead one of the two newly formed units.