New Merriman Curhan Ford unit takes two-prong approach to growth. William Banks has been named president of MCF Wealth Management, a subsidiary of San Francisco-based financial-service holding company MCF Corporation. He was previously head of sales and marketing for Advisor Software, Inc., a technology provider to registered investment advisors (RIAs) that’s better known as ASI.

“We have known Bill [Banks] for years,” says MCF Wealth Management CEO Greg Curhan. “His experience and energy will be instrumental in building out our wealth-management platform as we further our relationships with [RIAs].”

MCF Corporation created MCF Wealth Management early this year to house Oakland, Calif.-based Catalyst Financial Planning & Investment Management, an RIA firm which had just been acquired by Merriman Curhan Ford & Co., its brokerage division and investment-banking division.

Familiar face

MCF Wealth Management seeks to grow in several ways. First it wants to turn some of Merriman Curhan Ford’s investment-banking clients into private clients. “Every day [our investment banking and corporate and venture services businesses] create liquidity for entrepreneurs who are creating wealth,” Curhan says. “The wealth-management business extends the services we can offer to management teams of our corporate clients by providing them with a resource to help them manage their personal assets.”

At the same time MCF Wealth Management wants to expand by acquiring RIA practices that fit with Catalyst’s fee-only approach. “We intend to grow our wealth-management and asset-management platform[s] aggressively through both organic growth and acquisitions,” Curhan said earlier this year.

Hiring Banks to help MCF Wealth Management’s pull in independent advisors seems to make sense in view of his former role as a representative of a vendor to that space.

Until about two years ago MCF Corporation was known as RateXchange, a communications bandwidth exchange provider. It established a brokerage subsidiary called RTX Securities in 2002. That became Merriman Curhan Ford about a year later.

MCF Corporation says it views wealth management as a way to diversify its revenue streams, which have been dominated by brokerage and investment banking revenues. –FWR

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