Focused referrals, branch-personnel training and better customer relations underpin new strategy. TD Waterhouse is opening new branches at fair clip this year. Last week it opened its third Boston-area location. Days earlier it opened its fifth Manhattan branch. The push is part of the discount brokerage’s strategy to extend advisory services in “key markets” in the U.S.

“We're very excited to expand our presence in the Boston area and look forward to helping the residents of Burlington make confident investment decisions,” John Bunch, head of U.S. branch distribution for TD Waterhouse, says in a press release. A week or so before that he was “very excited” about the chance to “cater to the sophisticated customers of the Upper West Side.”

If all goes to plan, Bunch is liable to feel “very excited” about new branches in Braintree, Mass., and San Diego before the year is out.

The new branches are part of New York-based TD Waterhouse’s plan to become a bigger institutional service provider to independent financial advisors. At its annual advisor conference in early February the firm unveiled its new-look customer referral program.

“We've overhauled AdvisorDirect in order to provide more qualified and targeted leads for advisors,” Thomas Nally of TD Waterhouse’s institutional services group told delegates to the firm’s Partnership 2005 conference in San Diego. “Our goal is to increase the rate of converted accounts for advisors by providing an enhanced, tailored program that matches the right high-net-worth customer to the right independent financial advisor.”

To start, TD Waterhouse raised end-client minimums from $100,000 to $200,000 to provide “a more realistic match to advisor-firm minimums.” It also pledged to restructure branch assignments to give advisors “more manageable, focused relationships,” and to streamline referrals – by which it meant that clients would be referred to just one advisor at a time. Beyond that, it promised to bring back advisor seminars to give advisors better visibility to potential referrals, do a better job of training branch consultants, introduce fee sharing “to increase the level of commitment by advisors and TD Waterhouse,” and provide advisors with quarterly reports to help them evaluate AdvisorDirect’s impact on their practices.

More important than those things, however, said Nally, is TD Waterhouse’s determination to strengthen “the relationship with our customers, by providing an enhanced service experience for those seeking discretionary, full-service advice from an independent financial advisor.”

In addition to enhancing service experiences in the U.S., in part by opening new branches, TD Waterhouse is also cutting ribbons north of the border. Tomorrow the firm opens a “state-of-the-art Advisor Centre” in Edmonton, Alberta.

TD Waterhouse is part of Toronto, Ontario-based TD Bank Financial Group. –FWR

(In Brief articles summarize press releases and other reports. Prepared by Family Wealth Report staff, they are not created, sponsored, approved or endorsed by the publications or companies that originated the reports.)