One Topic You Didn’t Hear Enough About at BISA

The 2019 BISA Annual Convention is in the books. To the many individuals that we were able to interact with over the course the conference and to all of you who attended our sessions and panels, thank you. We appreciate your interest in our work and the opportunity to share it with you. To those that we missed, we hope to see you at a future conference.

There was a lot of great content at BISA this year. But we can’t help but note one topic that was largely absent from the agenda, although it came up in our conversations plenty: the integration of trust, private banking, and retail investments under a single wealth management umbrella. As we have written about previously, more banks are looking at integration as a way to differentiate themselves in an increasingly tight market for services and advice, and to deepen penetration of the bank’s wealthiest customers. Firms on the leading edge of this trend have integrated sales forces, platforms, and back office staffing and systems.

This is the part of Highlighter where I usually tell you about how Kehrer Bielan is responding to the needs of the industry with our research, consulting, and study groups. But the truth, in this instance, is that we have been nudging the industry in this direction for some time. Our first attempts to study integration and to bring together a group of executives interested in exploring integration came six years ago and were met with an industry that was largely unwelcome to the idea. The silos were too high and no one in the institution was willing to champion the effort to tear them down.

In the years that followed, we refined our approach, populated the concept with leaders in the industry, identified partners that shared our viewpoint, and watched as the concept of wealth management integration took hold as a full-fledged trend. More banks began putting the disparate pieces of their wealth management services under the purview of a single executive. Those executives became our allies, and visa-versa. Shortly we will launch a new effort to benchmark the integrated delivery of wealth management services, and in October we will reconvene our study group of executives responsible for managing the integrated wealth management unit in their institution. It’s amazing how far we have come.