Cetera Welcomes Former Commonwealth Advisors Jim Tucker, Patrick Bria and Their Team Overseeing Approximately $420 Million in AUA

After building their businesses over two decades, the advisors chose Cetera’s Summit community for its high-touch service, flexibility and commitment to helping advisors operate their way

Cetera welcomes financial advisors Jim Tucker, CFP®, CRPS®, and Patrick Bria, and the Tucker Bria Wealth Strategies team overseeing approximately $420 million in AUA1. Tucker Bria Wealth Strategies joined Cetera through its Summit Financial Networks2 community. Based in Durham, North Carolina, co-founders Tucker and Bria have built their practice together since 2013. The two have been friends since their teenage years in Pittsburgh, and later were teammates on Duke University’s varsity swim team.

Tucker Bria Wealth Strategies – a name built around the firm’s belief that “Life alters wealth^®” – provides individualized financial planning and wealth management to individuals and families navigating life’s transitions, from wealth creation and preservation to windfalls such as inheritances and business sales.

The move to Cetera follows more than a decade at Commonwealth Financial Network, a firm Tucker and Bria deliberately chose for its culture of experienced advisors and personalized support. When LPL announced its acquisition of Commonwealth, the partners launched a monthslong search for a new financial services partner, including traditional broker-dealers and RIA models.

Keeping continuity for clients, some of whom have been with the practice since its inception, was central to their search. With Cetera, the firm could maintain its existing custodian, Fidelity’s NFS. Another key decision point was Cetera’s flexibility, which allowed Tucker Bria to continue using third-party technology that had become integral to their client service model during their years at Commonwealth.

Ultimately, the firm wanted access to a well-established and scaled infrastructure, products, services and AI-powered growth resources – tools designed to augment how advisors already work, not change how they operate – without asking the practice to give up how it runs its business.

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“We were deliberate about choosing Commonwealth, and we were just as deliberate about where we went next. We wanted a partner strong enough to provide the compliance, technology and back-office support we didn’t want to build ourselves, but flexible enough to let us keep running our business exactly the way we always have,” Tucker said. “Summit has a clear reason for being, the same way our previous firm did, and that mattered to us as much as anything else.”

The firm’s high-touch approach to client service – centered on close, ongoing relationships rather than scale, with regularly scheduled client meetings and financial planning built around each family’s specific circumstances – was also at the forefront of their decision-making process.

“We tell our team to love our clients, not because of what they’ve entrusted to us, but because that’s simply the standard we hold ourselves to,” Bria said. “Our next-gen advisors are in the room with clients from day one, learning the relationships, not just the technical side of the job. Because of this, our clients know their advisor team is going to be in place for the next 30-plus years.”

Tucker Bria’s next generation – including Wealth Advisors Josh Polidori, CFP^®, CPFA^®; Financial Planning Associate Chris Bleeker; and Financial Planning Associate Taylor Clement, CFP^® – already serves as the primary point of contact for many of the firm’s second- and third-generation clients.

Tucker is also the author of Family, Legacy, Wealth: How to Nurture and Grow Your Family Orchard, a book designed to help families define and pass on their legacy, one that goes beyond money.

Welcoming the Tucker Bria team, Cetera Advisor Channel Leader Tom Halloran said: “Jim and Pat have spent decades building something special together that grew into a client-centered practice with the kind of robust next-gen advisor strategy that doesn’t happen by accident. We’re thrilled to welcome Jim, Pat and their team to Cetera, and we’re eager to help them expand their legacy for many years to come.”