Integrating Investment and Wealth Management

The impetus for the study group comes from two directions:

• Bank executives responsible for Trust and asset management as well as securities brokerage have reached out to us to see if we could provide the kind of benchmarking of the wealth management business that we pioneered for securities brokerage in the early 1990s.
• Our research suggests that the typical bank’s wealth management businesses—Trust, asset management, and securities brokerage—have captured only 5 percent of the bank’s customers’ investible assets.

Previous attempts to address the wealth management integration in a roundtable discussion group have brought together senior executives in bank brokerage, and those discussions have deteriorated into therapy sessions complaining that bank retail financial advisors are excluded from working with the bank’s most affluent customers. For our study group, we are looking for executives who are responsible for all the components of wealth management and are in a position to identify the elements of each business model that result in top performance and consider alternative organizational structures.