Merrill Lynch just created a new role to oversee its 100-plus markets for US financial advisers and address a 'substantial difference' in performance around the country
- Merrill Lynch, Bank of America's wealth management arm, has created a new role, the national business development executive. It's appointed a former market executive, Craig Young, to the post.
- Young will focus on leveling advisers' performance across the US, aiming to ensure that "there's not much distance between our best-performing and our worst-performing markets," said Andy Sieg, the president of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, told Business Insider in an interview.
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Bank of America's wealth management business has created a new leadership position to help its less successful wealth adviser markets catch up with its strongest performers.
Merrill Lynch Wealth Management on Tuesday named Craig Young, previously a market executive with the firm on the East Coast, as its first national business development executive. Young will be based in New York and report to Andy Sieg, the president of Merrill Lynch.
He'll focus on leveling advisers' performance across the US, aiming to ensure that "there's not much distance between our best-performing and our worst-performing markets," Sieg said in an interview with Business Insider on Tuesday.
Merrill and its wirehouse rivals have dialed way back on recruiting experienced financial advisers, and have instead focused on boosting productivity from their existing headcount. Sieg said that the new position will be focused on staying on top of performance across the country's many markets and making sure that local leaders are being held accountable.
"At the market level, there's substantial difference in terms of how strongly we're performing," he said. A spokesperson declined to provide examples of markets with disparate performance levels. More generally, market executives tend to track measures including market profit and loss, customer acquisition and growth revenue.
Young will be responsible for bringing consistency across the 105 markets the wirehouse has across the US. Market executives will continue to drive their own markets, but Young's role will be to help them devise better execution plans and hold them accountable.
"We created a several-day program to help enhance the skills of market executives. We followed that up with the creation of market plans so that each of our 105 markets is operating against a written plan," Sieg said. "This is now kind of a next step, which is how do we actually build a function into our organization that's helping us create that level of consistency?"
Young, who was previously the market executive for the area that encompasses Westchester, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, joined Merrill in 2015 as an associate market executive in Los Angeles. He later served as the market executive in Pasadena, California from 2016 to 2018 before moving to the New York area.
He'll now oversee internal organizations including Merrill Lynch's Advisor Growth Network and the Market Executive Strategy Council, which partly aim to forge communication between financial advisers and business leaders.
Merrill Lynch reported some $2.6 trillion in client assets and around 17,400 financial advisers and financial solutions advisers as of December 31.
Young will travel to different markets and spend time with local leaders "in their markets, and in their offices, so that he can keep a close pulse on how the strategy is being executed" on the ground, Sieg said.
Before Young got into the wealth management business, he earned his bachelor's degree in business administration from California Polytechnic State University, where he played football as a running back.
"As a young kid, I wanted to do something in business," he told the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper in 2015. "Football was my passion but as a college student, I was also interested in finance. I felt that business would allow me to bring who I am into what I do and to put my best skill sets to work."
Like its traditional wealth management competitors, Merrill Lynch has grappled with the industry's changing relationships and roles. The business isn't attracting newcomers like it used to, and firms are focusing heavily on recruitment and robust internal training efforts to draw top talent and show them the ropes.
Business Insider first reported last month that Merrill Lynch is expanding the scope of its training programs, opening up development resources to its 6,500 client associates.
More than 111,500 advisers will retire in the next decade, representing more than one-third of industry adviser headcount and assets, according to estimates from the industry research firm Cerulli Associates.
