Campanale to help build out wealth-management platforms for IBD affiliates. Advanced Equities Financial Corporation (AEFC) has named Frank Campanale, former head of Smith Barney 's Consulting Group, as CEO of its Wealth Management unit.

Campanale will supervise the expansion of wealth-management and investment-consulting products and services to AEFC's independent-broker subsidiaries First Allied Securities and FFP Securities and its "captive" private-client group Advanced Equities Inc.

"[Campanale] has a profound understanding of the investment management space," says Dwight Badger, CEO and co-founder (with chairman Keith Daubenspeck) of AEFC. "His joining the company is consistent with our goal of enhancing our position as one of the industry's premier money management firms and [it] also exemplifies [Advanced Equities'and First Allied's] unwavering commitment to develop a superior investment and wealth management platform."

Redux

After a stint as a Merrill Lynch broker, Campanale joined E.F. Hutton in the mid 1970s. Hutton was then pioneering a brokerage-based approach to private clients based on the fee-based institutional-consulting model that, from a product viewpoint, helped engender the separately managed account industry. He stuck with Hutton as it changed hands several times in the 1980s and 1990s including its merger with Smith Barney and a subsequent acquisition by Citigroup.

Campanale helped found Smith Barney's fee-based Consulting Group in 1995 and led it until he left Smith Barney late in 2003. Since then he has been operating a consulting firm based in West Bloomfield, Mich. -- and, he says, fielding job offers.

But what he found in AEFC set it apart from other firms. "It's just a very cool company," he says. "It has the great boutique feel of an E.F. Hutton in the early days."

AEFC is a "boutique" by wirehouse standards, maybe. Altogether, its affiliates field more than 1,000 advisors who administer about $30 million for their clients.

Expanding on the topic of his new mission, Campanale says he'll be working to establish and support a comprehensive wealth-management platform for AEFC-affiliated brokers including money-manager research and portfolio-management and client-reporting technology. The result, he says, will help AEFC advisors bring in institutional as well as private clients.

"I'm confident that we will continue to build [on] and enhance [AEFC's] distinctive wealth management approach and make [Advanced Equities and First Allied] the partner of choice for entrepreneurial advisors committed to growing their businesses," says Campanale.

By one measure at least, AEFC is already a formidable distributor. In 2006 Investment Advisor magazine said its First Allied affiliate had the highest average annual gross production per advisor -- $282,000 -- of any independent broker-dealer. -FWR

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