Orchard Financial Group, a $580 million Ameriprise team, joins Wells Fargo's FiNet

A Los Angeles team that managed $580 million as an Ameriprise Financial franchisee has broken away to Wells Fargo's independent Financial Network. AdvisorHub reported the move.

Orchard Financial Group produced $4.3 million in annual revenue and is led by advisors Anthony Perez, Audre Schmedes, Eric Smutko and Michael Kawase, the spokesperson said. Three additional advisors and four support staff joined with them.

"Their commitment to serving clients and ambition to grow in the Los Angeles area makes them a strong addition, and we're proud they chose FiNet for their next chapter," John Tyers, president of FiNet, said in a statement.

Two other Ameriprise exits reported this month went in a different direction: teams managing $5.6 billion combined left to launch their own RIAs in New Hampshire and Minnesota. Orchard's move stayed inside a broker-dealer channel, from Ameriprise's franchise model to Wells Fargo's independent network.

Ameriprise, based in Minneapolis, has about 10,000 brokers and no longer reports exact headcount. It has supplied several teams to rivals this year: as this publication reported in September, Schwab's four Ameriprise raids of 2026 involved $10 billion or more in assets. FiNet's recruiting has run the same way; last month a $1.3 billion UBS team joined FiNet practice Ascend Advisory Group in Ohio, and Wells executives said in April that a multi-channel approach to hiring brokers was working.

Three of Orchard's four named leaders started their careers at Ameriprise's IDS Life Insurance predecessor in 2003 or 2004, according to BrokerCheck. Schmedes first registered with Merrill Lynch in 2017 and moved to Ameriprise three years later.