Wall Street nurtures specialists within teams as the boomer model of choice. It may have been a broker's favorite tactic in the past, but Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney are phasing out training in the art of the cold call, replacing it with training in statistical analysis, behavioral finance, financial planning and wealth management, all in hopes of winning business from the hard-to-please baby boomer.

"In the past we used to look for motivated, self-starters as everything was organized around sales," Joseph Rizzo, a business-development executive with Smith Barney, Citigroup's brokerage unit, told Dow Jones last week. Now though the focus is on recruiting subject-area specialists such as attorneys, accountants and certified financial planners (CFP) -- who are then given instruction in planning, advisory and risk mitigation.

Springes to catch woodcocks

Merrill is keen that its recruits earn industry accreditations such as the CFP designation within five years. Citigroup encourages them to mine -- and to mine deeply -- in-house expertise on such things as art collecting and philanthropy.

This gentrification of the registered representative is part of a larger move toward specialization to support the development of brokerage teams. According to Dow Jones -- citing statistics quoted by "a senior executive at Smith Barney" -- a team-based advisor can generate as much as 36% more in revenue and bring in 42% more in assets under management than a lone advisor.

These teams are Wall Street's answer to finicky baby boomers, who -- 78-million strong in the U.S., possessed of more than 40% of the private all private assets in this country and now edging into retirement -- "want more holistic financial advice, not just the stock tip of the day," says Tiburon's Strategic Advisors' Chip Roame as quoted by Dow Jones. Tiburon, Calif.-based Tiburon's Strategic Advisors is a research and consulting firm.

Boomers are also notoriously skeptical about financial-service providers. As a result they challenge "firms and advisors to ensure that their rates are fair and commensurate with the services rendered," says John Nersesian, managing director of wealth management services at Chicago-based Nuveen Investments, an asset-management firm.

Under this theory the team-based approach to provides clients with more service for their fees. In fact the overall offering consciously apes the style of a boutique advisory -- minus the rigors of a true fiduciary.

The Dow Jones article misses a major point in favor of brokerage-team building, however. From the firm's point of view, teams "institutionalize" the client relationship as never before. In other words, clients make the firm, or at least the team, as the focus of their loyalty, not an individual advisor. So if a particular team member happens to up stakes, other team members -- perhaps eying their incentive packages -- are apt to stay put, lessening the chances that the breakaway broker can take the bulk of his book along with him. In turn, this new dynamic may aid in the full-services brokerage's ability to keep its top producers in place.

Dow Jones also fails to examine the connections between Smith Barney's and Merrill's respective moves to ditch their proprietary investment-product units and their campaigns to recast themselves -- though by no means out of the blue -- as wealth managers. -FWR

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