A $1.3 billion UBS duo joins Ascend Advisory Group in Dublin, Ohio

Jeffrey S. Cullman and W. Bruce Holt, whose UBS Wealth Management USA team managed $1.3 billion, joined Ascend Advisory Group in Dublin, Ohio, on Tuesday with five support staff, landing at a Wells Fargo Financial Network practice in a move first reported by AdvisorHub and confirmed by a spokesperson for the hiring firm.

Ascend has been building since 2001, when Tony J. Reilly, a 34-year broker, founded it at Royal Alliance Associates and later moved it to FiNet in 2009, and it held $2.5 billion in assets as of December 2025. Against that base, the incoming $1.3 billion adds roughly half again, although the report's closing line attributes $1 billion to the team on the word of a source familiar with the move, leaving two asset figures circulating for the same book.

BrokerCheck records cited in the report put Cullman's first registration at Prudential Securities in 1995, then Wachovia Securities, a Wells predecessor, before he moved to UBS in 2005, and Holt had been at UBS for 24 years.

UBS executives have forecast an improvement in advisor retention and recruiting in the second half of 2026, after compensation and management changes produced a wave of defections across the past 19 months. The firm hired a Merrill Lynch duo in Palo Alto last week while rolling out a 2027 compensation plan pitched to stability earlier in the month, and our reporting on that pair found the hire came in below UBS's $10 million production minimum on a 16-year package paying 550% of revenue, with sources putting the book between $575 million and $1.2 billion.

Wells has recruited in the other direction, adding a private wealth broker producing $2.7 million in annual revenue from Merrill in Texas last month and, in July, a $1.7 billion team from RBC Wealth Management in Connecticut. John Tyers, president of FiNet, the bank's independent brokerage channel, credited the hire to Ascend's culture, describing in a statement a practice where entrepreneurial advisors work toward a collective mission of helping clients.

An advisor weighing independence reads a move like this one for what the incoming team avoided: Ascend was already standing, with a quarter century of operations and $2.5 billion of scale behind it, so Cullman and Holt likely joined as partners in an established enterprise rather than financing a first compliance department, a first trading desk and a first set of client-facing systems. Their share of that business is the term the announcement does not state, and it is the term a large team should ask about before it trades a wirehouse grid for a seat in someone else's practice.

Our September coverage of Modern Wealth's $710 million acquisition made a related point: a buyer can purchase a book without purchasing the people who run it. The Cullman/Holt move reverses that order, with the advisors choosing the firm and the ownership economics undisclosed. The number other teams will carry away from it is either the $1.3 billion in the report's headline or the $1 billion in its last line, and that gap is worth closing before anyone uses this deal to price a move.