PEOPLE: CHASE IS ON FOR NEW INVESTOR BIZ

Scott Bresky isn’t afraid to seek out new turf. As a young salesman for Moore Business Forms Inc. in the early 1980s, he went into gritty commercial sections of Newark, N.J., to find new customers.

“Very few other salespeople wanted to go into Newark, so when I did, I was met with great receptivity and did very well,” says Mr. Bresky, who rose to district supervisor at Moore in Edison, N.J.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Mr. Bresky is still carving out new territory. As recently named president of Chase Investment Services Corp., he is charged with helping make Chase Manhattan Corp. a player in the securities business.

attracting investors

Selling stocks and bonds has long been the business of brokerages, but commercial banks like Chase have increasingly begun to invade their territory by building up in-house investment units.

In June, Chase combined its various brokerage businesses into Chase Investment Services Group in hopes of marketing investments along with its standard banking services.

Mr. Bresky, 42, oversees the group’s retail broker-dealer division, 260 financial consultants in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. That division accounts for about one-fourth of the Investment Services Group’s more than $300 million in annual revenues.

Before Chase merged with Only about 5% of Chase Manhattan’s 2.4 million customers now invest with the institution Chemical Bank, Mr. Bresky led the development of Chemical’s investment services arm. From 1992 to 1995, the Livingston, N.J., native recruited and trained a dozen sales managers and expanded the bank’s network of brokers from 30 to 190.

One of his current goals is to expand the number of clients. Currently, only about 5% of Chase’s 2.4 million customers invest with the $366 billion institution. “We think there’s a tremendous opportunity for us within our own environment,” he says.

two cultures

But persuading customers — particularly the wealthy ones, who tend to invest the most — that Chase can offer the breadth
of investment products and services easily obtained at a large brokerage house is a tall order, says Lawrence Cohn, a stock analyst with Ryan, Beck & Co. in West Orange, N.J. Indeed, banks are slow to build their brokerage operations and hire or train staff that’s sophisticated enough to sell the services, he says.

“You’re offering listed stocks or over-the-counter stocks or options, commodities, 20 different flavors of bond funds, trust services, investment planning, mutual funds,” Mr. Cohn says. “That stuff doesn’t just drop down from the sky, it costs a lot to build.”

Mr. Bresky also must meld a buttoned-down banking culture with a more entrepreneurial attitude toward selling investments.

Gregory Rotella, president of Chase Investment Services Group, says Mr. Bresky’s combination of investment management and banking experience is key to linking existing banking relationships with investment offerings.

Mr. Bresky’s background in the field stretches back to the mid-1980s, when “everybody was making money in the financial services business, and I said, ‘I can do that too,’ ” he explains. Before joining Chemical, he helped develop investment services at San Francisco-based First Nationwide Bank and at the defunct Carteret Bank in Parsippany, N.J.

Crain News Service