Sallie’s back: Krawcheck to lead BofA’s wealth management group

Former top Citigroup executive Sallie Krawcheck is joining Bank of America Corp. as head of its global wealth and investment management group, according to a statement from the Charlotte, N.C.-based company.

She replaces Brian Moynihan, who was named to a new position as the head of consumer banking.

Bank of America spokesman Scott Silvestri was not immediately available to comment.

Ms. Krawcheck — who was reportedly being considered to take over the top spot at UBS AG’s U.S.-based wealth management business — was most recently in charge of the wealth management business at Citigroup Inc. of New York.

UBS is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

At Citigroup, Ms. Krawcheck, 44, was in charge of the Smith Barney brokerage group.

Last September, as the markets were collapsing, Citigroup announced that Ms. Krawcheck was leaving the company at the end of the year. At the time, it was widely reported that Ms. Krawcheck and Citigroup senior management, including chief executive Vikram Pandit, had a series of disagreements over strategy.

For example, she reportedly endorsed a program to have the firm offer to repurchase billions of dollars of auction rate securities from Smith Barney clients after the market froze in February 2008, something that Mr. Pandit felt was unaffordable.

She was reportedly offered a new senior-level consulting position at Citigroup, but chose to leave instead.

Soon after Ms. Krawcheck left, Citigroup in January said it was selling a majority stake of Smith Barney to Morgan Stanley of New York.

With Ms. Krawcheck’s appointment at BofA, the role of Daniel Sontag appears to be unclear. Mr. Sontag has served as the senior vice president and head of global wealth management’s American client relationship group at Merrill Lynch. The BofA announcement earlier today made no mention of Mr. Sontag, the executive who oversees the retail branch network of 16,850 Merrill reps and advisers.

Mr. Sontag took that job in January when Robert McCann left the firm after the completion of the merger with BofA.

Along with Ms. Krawcheck’s new role, the latest shakeup at BofA exiles or weakens the standing of some of Mr. Lewis’s longstanding colleagues at the bank and bolsters the power of some Merrill Lynch executives — a sign of the rapid change in the fortune of the bank since its ill-timed purchase of Merrill in late 2008.

Consumer banking and small-business-banking head Liam McGee is being ushered out after 20 years and Mr. Moynihan has been shuffled over to assume Mr. McGee’s portfolio, giving up control of the three-legged empire of corporate banking, investment banking and global wealth management. That appears to put the outsiders, Ms. Krawcheck and capital markets head Tom Montag, in a position to succeed Mr. Lewis, who has taken heat and blame from Congress and former Bush administration officials for his management of the Merrill takeover.

Mr. Montag, a former Goldman Sachs trading executive, was recruited to Merrill by former Merrill CEO John Thain just a month before Mr. Thain arranged the sale of the brokerage giant to BofA. His future was in doubt at the time, but Monday Mr. Lewis named him to run the global markets sector that Mr. Moynihan had overseen.

Jed Horowitz contributed to this story.

Related Topics: Bank Of America Corp., Merrill Lynch, Wealth Management