Bank Of America Private Bank's Growing Digital Momentum, Advisor Headcount

Tom Burroughes

25 February 2022

organization mirrors how we look after clients. As a business, our goal is to serve the holistic needs of clients. By creating this new organization, we can help ensure we are delivering world class solutions across the full spectrum of client needs – from wealth planning to investments to trust services. We now manage our full set of solutions within one team,” he said.

“For the private bank and our clients, one of the great advantages we have is we are deeply integrated with the other lines of business at Bank of America. We can meet the wealth management needs of our clients in the broadest sense,” he continued.

“Our clients own businesses, run family offices and are senior executives of companies. One of the things we can do to help them is give them access to the capabilities of the broader enterprise,” he said.

He gave an example of how work with clients is handled: “A private banker had been working with the client, the founder of a medical technology company based in the Northeast, for over a decade. Recently the client mentioned he wanted to sell a company in his portfolio. Accordingly, the private banker surrounded the client with our planning team to map out strategic exit options, estate planning and tax implications, and ultimately introduced our investment banking team to execute the transaction.”

“The transaction closed last year – the company was sold to a large medical services firm aiming to build out a virtual-first health plan. The private banker, in partnership with his wealth strategist and business owner strategist, is now working with the client post liquidity on investment and philanthropic strategies,” he said.

The organization has changed – Bank of America Private Bank is the name of the old US Trust brand and changed a year ago. The renaming has “gone extremely well”.

What are clients concerned about?

Busconi said areas of concern are estate planning, philanthropy and legacy planning. “The pandemic has accelerated this thinking and reinforced this mindset,” he said.

Conversations with clients have surged since 2018, by about two times that level, he said. “Our team of wealth planners conducted over 11,000 sessions last year with clients and prospects, nearly double pre-pandemic levels,” he said.

“We have seen huge amounts of activity around the wealth and estate planning space. On tax, we have been in an environment where they have been planning for US changes at the federal level for several years. There has been a lot of conversation around it,” he said.

One reason for more conversations about wealth/business transfer is because people, working from home with their families, have spoken more to other family members about these issues, Busconi added.