Banks positioned to lure wealth management business
Banks have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grab market share in the wealth management business.
Banks have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grab market share in the wealth management business, according to Joseph Schlidt, senior vice president for M&I Wealth Management.
Headline-making scandals such as those involving Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford have undermined consumer confidence in wealth managers, Mr. Schlidt said today at the American Bankers Association’s annual Wealth Management and Trust Conference in San Francisco.
“Banks have the highest level of trust and confidence out there. Our fiduciary responsibility is an incredibly powerful value proposition,” he said.
Wealth management was also critical to net income growth for banks, he said, pointing to attractive profit margins in areas such as trust services, credit, the brokerage business and risk management.
“The future is fee-based banking,” Mr. Schlidt said.
He stressed the importance of increased and more-effective communication with clients in this economic environment, which was a major theme at the conference.
“We have to reframe our dialogue with clients,” said Steve Doty, New York-based national director of portfolio management at Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
“We have to find a new way to communicate with them and give them a better context of what’s going on,” he said. “The old language of ‘stay the course and everything will be OK’ just does not fly any longer.”
M&I Wealth Management is a division of Marshall & Ilsley Corp. of Milwaukee, a financial services company with about $62 billion in assets. The ABA is based in Washington.
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