Broadway Federal plans to offer high-touch service in an inner-city setting. Los Angeles-based Broadway Federal Bank has opened a wealth-management unit with the aim of wresting market-share from the big-name institutions its customers usually turn to for help managing substantial assets. To accomplish that the community bank - "the oldest and largest African-American and Latino owned and operated bank" west of the Mississippi - has an improved its private-banking platform, brought in third-party investments and trained a cadre of staffers to take the Broadway Federal's wealth-management message into the generally lower-income communities the bank serves.

"Our plan is to have the relationship and identify the customers' needs and then bring in the outsourced capabilities," says Paul Hudson, Broadway Federal's CEO. "In that way we're bridging the gap between the customer and the service."

Outsourcing alternatives are also crucial to getting Broadway Federal - which doesn't have a trust department or a legacy brokerage business - a starting position in a race for wallet share against established brokerages of all sizes and a small mob of local, regional and national banks.

You can't sit back

To reach beyond its traditional depository and small-business base, Broadway Federal is providing enhanced depository and credit services as well as a third-party investment platform - even if Hudson can't name it for now. "The deal isn't quite finalized," he says, adding that the bank had a false start with a wirehouse-affiliated provider. "We were too small for them," says Hudson. But the new vendor suits Broadway Federal better for being "someone we feel looks at us as an important part of their overall strategy."

There's something of that in Broadway Federal's own approach to wealth management - which extends even to the delineation of its target market. The customers Broadway Federal has identified as wealth-service recipients would be relegated to call centers by most other firms.

"We have clients with $100,000 in passbook accounts worried about retirement and rising health costs as well as younger people looking for loans and ways to leverage businesses," says Hudson. "The point is we can help these people in various ways to improve their financial health. This is an effort to say there are people who can help."

And to get word of this out, Broadway Federal's staffers are taking to the streets. "Literally to the streets," says Hudson. The bank has trained up a number of its personnel to go from business to business calling on promising candidates for the bank's wealth services. "Our goal  is to let people know that there is one person who will responsible for them, one person they can come to and call for help at any time, 24 hours a day," says Hudson, referring to the unusually strong bonds he hopes to help build between customer and relationship manager - unusually strong in the context of the "mass-affluent" market anyway.

This reliance on existing staff to bring in and serve well-to-do clients is partly a reflection of Broadway Federal's desire to give "in-house people an opportunity to grow with us," says Hudson. But it also addresses the stark fact that "most experienced wealth managers with and understanding of and empathy for the people we serve are working with more upscale clients at more established firms," notes Hudson. Though that doesn't keep Broadway Federal from hoping to attract experienced wealth managers - "possibly even with established books of business," says Hudson - it also doesn't keep it from moving now to capture assets that might otherwise go to the bank's bigger rivals.

"As community bankers we can't sit in our branches and wait for customers anymore," says Hudson. "We have to get out and take our services to the community."

Broadway Federal operates three branches in Los Angeles and one in nearby Inglewood, Calif. -FWR

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