Cleros Wealth Launches With $3.61 Billion After UBS Breakaway

Cleros Wealth Partners is starting with approximately $3.61 billion in client assets and a substantial base of long-standing relationships. The 11-person Fort Worth team has left UBS to establish an independent registered investment advisor, with a minority investment from Elevation Point and custody through Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions.

The scale of the launch adds to Elevation Point’s growing roster of teams that have left UBS. For Cleros, the move also changes how its partners can shape the firm’s services and investment options for families and community organizations whose ties to the team stretch back decades.

A local client base with long roots

Founding partners Kyle Kight, Alex Armstrong and Jamie Packer previously operated at UBS as Thompson, Kight, Armstrong & Packer. Cleros says it serves high-net-worth families as well as several community-focused endowments and foundations, most based in Fort Worth and nearby Tarrant County.

More than half of the team’s clients have worked with it for over 20 years, Cleros says. Some relationships extend beyond 30 years. That history gives the launch a different emphasis from a simple change in firm affiliation: the partners are moving an established book of client relationships into a new operating structure, while seeking to preserve continuity for households and institutions they have advised over time.

The partners say independence will widen their investment options and help them address the transfer of wealth across generations. Kight, who has spent 27 years in the business, described the aim as continuing to provide personal advice and plans for protecting and growing clients’ assets for their families and communities.

Packer said Elevation Point understood the team’s long-term commitment and the Fort Worth history that informs its client relationships. The firm’s local focus may matter as it develops: a transition involving multigenerational families and community institutions calls for attention to established relationships as well as the practical work of building a separate advisory business.

Elevation Point builds a breakaway network

Minneapolis-based Elevation Point was founded in June 2024 by Jim Dickson, formerly CEO of Sanctuary Wealth. It provides capital, technology and back-office support to advisors leaving larger firms, and has taken minority stakes in several breakaway practices. Its arrangement with Cleros is part of that model: the new firm gains an outside capital provider and operational support while its founding team establishes an independent business.

The firm’s recent UBS-related investments span several markets and reported asset levels. In October, Elevation Point took a stake in Truing Capital Advisors, a Las Vegas firm formed by a UBS team overseeing about $750 million. Earlier this year, it backed Atlanta-area teams Harbor View Private Wealth and Hampton Bluff Capital Partners, each with roughly $1.3 billion. The linked coverage of Harbor View Private Wealth also tracks the team’s launch.

In 2025, Elevation Point supported the creation of Family Office Partners, a $2.5 billion firm in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Loxahatchee Capital, a $1.4 billion multifamily office in Tequesta, Florida. The range of reported asset levels suggests the platform is supporting teams with different starting scales, while the repeated UBS connection makes Cleros part of a wider pattern of departures from the bank’s US wealth business.

Elevation Point has also expanded its relationship with Goldman Sachs. Its custody and service arrangement is relevant to the Cleros launch because the team will use Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions. Custody is one part of the new firm’s infrastructure; the partners’ stated case for independence centers on broader investment choices and serving clients across generations.

UBS departures include different destinations

UBS had 5,644 advisors in the Americas at the end of June, down 2.2% from a year earlier. Its third-quarter figure showed a further decline, to 5,601. On a late-October call, Chief Financial Officer Todd Tuckner characterized some net advisor attrition as normal for the industry, with advisors continuing to move to independent firms.

Louis Diamond, managing partner at Diamond Consultants, offered a more qualified reading of those departures in a LinkedIn post. The consultancy’s first-half 2026 transition data showed roughly two-thirds of UBS advisors who left during that period moved to another W-2 firm, he said. That was the highest share among the four major wirehouses analyzed. Across UBS, Merrill, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, approximately 51% of departing advisors made a similar move, according to Diamond.

That distinction puts Cleros’s choice in context. Its partners are establishing an independent firm, while Diamond’s figures indicate that many UBS advisors who depart remain employees elsewhere. The movement therefore reflects more than one response to the experience of working at a large firm; advisors may choose a different employer or build an independent business.

Diamond said departures had eased from elevated levels the prior year, but reported continued concerns among UBS advisors who contact his consultancy. Those concerns include compensation changes, firm policies and questions about the business’s direction. He argued that the number choosing another W-2 firm raises questions about whether departures are driven by the employment model or by conditions at the firm being left. A previous report on advisor departures provides further context for that comparison.

Cleros brings a distinct case to the trend: a sizable team with long client relationships, an independent structure, and Elevation Point backing. Its next test will be translating the partners’ stated priorities into consistent service for families and local institutions as the firm establishes its operations.