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BoA delineates its post-Merrill-merger leadership

Thomas Coyle

23 October 2008

Almost anyway: head of wealth and investment management unit still unnamed. Bank of America is leaving open for now the top management slot in the wealth- and investment-management unit that is to emerge from its early-2009 takeover of Merrill Lynch. Whoever lands that job will be a direct report to Merrill chairman and CEO John Thain in his post-merger role as president of Bank of America's Global Banking, Securities and Wealth Management division.

"The leader of Global Wealth and Investment Management will be determined in the future as the company works to define the target environment through the transition process," Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America says in a press release.

Big broker

Right now Keith Banks heads an identically named unit of Bank of America: Global Wealth and Investment Management. That encompasses U.S. Trust, Bank of America's high-net-worth business, and Columbia Management, its asset manager. When the merger is completed, however, he will lose that title but retain overall responsibility for those businesses.

Robert McCann, head of Merrill's Global Wealth Management (GWM) retail brokerage is slated to take charge of the much enlarged financial advisor organization Bank of America is getting through its acquisition of Merrill.

With about 16,000 brokers as it heads into the merger, Merrill GWM has the biggest securities sales force on the planet. Bank of America's financial-service retailer, Banc of America Investments, has about 2,000 representatives.

TBA

Pending the selection of a post-merger head for Bank of America Global Wealth and Investment Management, McCann and Banks will report directly to Thain.

Bank of America can't pick a wealth- and investment management chief until it knows, in more detail, what its wealth- and investment management businesses will look like, according to Bank of America spokesman Robert Stickler.

To that end, teams from Bank of America and Merrill are now working to build complete pictures of their respective private-client and investment-management businesses with a view to determining what those businesses will look like when combined, says Stickler.

"Merrill has a much bigger wealth-management business in terms of assets, but Bank of America's is broader," says Stickler -- adding that by "broader" he means a range of channels from Bank of America's retail-bank-linked Premier Banking services for the mass affluent to its private-banking and multifamily-office services for ultra-high-net-worth clients.

Ouch

Determining what wealth-management markets to concentrate on and deciding what degree of integration with existing banking operations is desirable will help Bank of America choose a new Global Wealth and Investment Management head, according to Stickler.

Bank of America will fill this position before the acquisition is completed within a few months.

And it may be guessed that Frances Aldrich Sevilla-Sacasa, now CEO of U.S. Trust, isn't in the running for it.

When asked why Sevilla-Sacasa wasn't named with Banks and McCann among Bank of America's after-merger wealth-management leadership, Stickler replied: "We haven't moved down to that level yet."

Also reporting to Thain will be Merrill COO Greg Fleming as head of Global Corporate and Investment Banking, which will take commercial banking in tow, and Merrill sales and trading chief Tom Montag, who will be head of Bank of America's Global Markets group, which includes sales, trading and research. Peter Kraus, head of Global Strategy at Merrill, has decided to leave the company when the acquisition is completed. -FWR

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