Roughly two weeks after closing its $1.6 billion deal for discount broker Quick & Reilly Group, Boston-based Fleet Financial Group is ready to fold its brokerage capabilities into those of its new subsidiary.
Next Tuesday, roughly 300,000 customers of Fleet Brokerage Securities will have their accounts turned over to Quick & Reilly. The new Quick & Reilly will handle 1.3 million brokerage accounts through a branch network of 118 offices in 34 states.
For now, Quick & Reilly will retain its name. But Fleet is doing market research on whether to include the banking company name in the brokerage subsidiary's brand identity, said Gunnar S. Overstrom Jr., vice chairman of Fleet.
Any major advertising push to tout the changeover will be put on hold until the results of the research come back, said Mr. Overstrom. However, clients are getting statement stuffers, he said.
The 118-branch office network came from consolidating 13 Fleet Brokerage branches and 116 Quick & Reilly offices. A Quick & Reilly spokesman noted the overlap in areas such as Sunnyvale, Calif., and Washington, D.C.
The consolidation created some casualties, Mr. Overstrom said. "We did a very thorough evaluation of the people at Quick & Reilly and Fleet Brokerage," he said.
Some 106 of Fleet Brokerage's 205 employees will not be joining Quick & Reilly, the spokesman said. Some of these employees are to be offered jobs elsewhere in Fleet.
After Tuesday's changeover, the combined work force of Fleet Brokerage and Quick & Reilly and its subsidiaries will be 1,416. Quick & Reilly's broker sales force will grow to 557, including 57 Fleet brokers.
Frieda Lewis, president and chief executive officer of Fleet Brokerage, will join Quick & Reilly as an executive vice president, the spokesman said.
Both Mr. Overstrom and Thomas C. Quick, president of Quick & Reilly, noted that Tuesday's move is just the first step of the brokerage integration.
"It's also a distribution play for Fleet in terms of having 118 offices across the country to distribute the investment products of the Fleet Financial Group," said Mr. Overstrom.
"Our sales group is actively working right now with the individuals involved with Galaxy Funds and" Columbia Management Co., said Mr. Quick. "That's something you should see in the branches in the next week or two."
The Galaxy Funds are Fleet's proprietary fund family, and Portland, Ore.-based Columbia, a fund manager, was acquired by the banking company in December for $600 million.
And looking ahead, Mr. Quick said, the brokerage operation will examine the possibility of setting up branches soon in Maine and New Hampshire- where Fleet has a retail banking presence-and in Vermont.
