Ameriprise Financial Inc. is calling 10,000 of its financial advisers to its headquarters for technology training on a grand scale.
The big broker-dealer is spending more than $10 million and dedicating 200 employees for several months to bring virtually all of its advisers to Minneapolis for a three-day all-expenses-paid tech boot camp.
About 500 advisers a week are learning the nuances of the wealth management technology that Ameriprise spent "hundreds of millions" of dollars on during the past two years, according to company spokeswoman Ann Wasik.
The program started on Jan. 23 and will extend through April 9, she added.
Some advisers are singing the praises of the program.
"It was energizing to see Ameri-prise put that much money into it when it wasn't even about product," said Jim Bruggers, Ameriprise adviser partner with Bruggers Lawrence & Associates of Litchfield, Minn., which manages $200 million. He attended one of the three-day workshops in Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, other broker-dealers and asset custodians are also upping their efforts to train advisers in wealth management technology.
MORE SEMINARS
"We are spending countless hours and resources making sure we are creating an effective curriculum for [tech-related] training," said Edward O'Brien, senior vice president of technology product management of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services of Boston.
Fidelity held 950 tech-training seminars online last year, a number expected to increase 20% to 1,140 seminars in 2008, he added.
Schwab Institutional of San Francisco has a similarly large commitment to tech training with plans for 12 regional conferences throughout the country, according to spokeswoman Lindsay Tiles.
It makes perfect sense that there is an explosion of tech training in the adviser industry right now, said Dan Skiles, vice president of technology for Schwab Institutional.
"There are more choices today as it relates to technology and more opportunities to get scale," he said. "You need training, best practices and events to further that discussion."
Linsco/Private Ledger Corp. of Boston and San Diego also plans to make gigantic investments in technology and other training this year, according to Bill Dwyer, president of LPL's independent adviser services.
"LPL Financial will host over 200 training events in 2008," he wrote in an e-mail. "Our largest national event, FOCUS 2008, which takes place in Chicago this August, [is] one of the industry's largest educational conferences and will include over 9,000 attendees."
'CREATING A CULTURE'
Tech training by Ameriprise on a mass scale signals more for the company than pure technical concerns, said Jeff Gans, vice president of strategy and business development.
"We said, 'Let's take time and pull them out of the market and reconnect them to us,'" he said.
The strategy sets Ameriprise apart among the big brokers, said Steve Winks, principal of SrConsultant.com of Richmond, Va. "They're creating a culture, and that's so rare," he said. "It doesn't exist even at the wirehouses — a unifying way of doing things."
But Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management of New York also strives for that distinction, according to spokesman Erik Hendrickson.
"In terms of internal communication, we believe that the Merrill Lynch structure is second to none in the wealth management business," he wrote in an e-mail.
"We provide advisers with up-to-the-minute information, access to world-class technology systems and live broadcasts to their desktops via a secure satellite TV system," Mr. Hendrickson wrote.
"On the ground, we have regular interactions through representative employee councils that liaise with senior leadership," he wrote. "We are proud of our heritage."
By putting so much focus onto training the advisers, Ameriprise is revisiting the days when it was part of IDS, before New York-based American Express Co. acquired the company in 1984, according to advisers. American Express spun off Ameriprise in 2005. IDS, when it existed, was based in Minneapolis.
"One of the reasons I liked the original IDS is that the communication lines were very open, and we got away from that," Mr. Bruggers said.
"Now it's clear we can get anybody's ear," he said. "We like that close feeling."
But the new technology is key to making that close feeling extend to clients, said Jill Lawrence, Mr. Bruggers' partner.
Ameriprise tries to distinguish itself by emphasizing financial planning, but it takes technology to do that for all clients, she added.
Mixing technology with humanity is a good strategy, Mr. Bruggers said.
"They know they can't order us to do it so they're saying, 'tell us what you need to get the job done,'" he said.
Brooke Southall can be reached at [email protected].
