NEW ENGLAND FleetBoston Financial Corp. has named two of its executive vice presidents to lead its Connecticut operations.
James G. Connolly will become chairman and CEO of Fleet in Connecticut next year, and Chandler Howard will become president.
Mr. Connolly, 39, will remain in Boston as president of Fleet Capital Corp.'s Northeast region, which covers Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
He has 14 years of commercial banking experience at FleetBoston and its predecessors, starting at Bank of New England, which Fleet bought in 1991.
Mr. Howard, 49, will remain market manager for branch banking in Connecticut and western Massachusetts, a post he has held since he joined the company in 1996. Before that he had been a senior vice president and the Hartford regional manager for $10.7 billion-asset People's Bank in Bridgeport, Conn., where he had started his banking career as a branch teller in 1974.
Their new assignments reshuffle roles that have been held by Richard Higginbotham and Eileen Kraus. Mr. Higginbotham, who has been Fleet's Connecticut president and CEO since 1995, will relocate to Boston next year and focus on his responsibilities as managing director of Fleet's commercial finance division. Ms. Kraus retired as Connecticut chairman last year and is now a special Fleet adviser in the state.
MIDDLE ATLANTIC BlackRock Inc. in New York, an affiliate of PNC Financial Services Group Inc., has hired Andrew Krull as a mortgage industry specialist in its Solutions Mortgage Servicing team, which manages relationships with mortgage banks and delivers risk management solutions to the servicing industry.Mr. Krull was the head of analytics at the New York office of BayView Financial Trading Group.
Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York has named Sue Dabarno, the global head of sales and marketing for its international private client group, as president and chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch Canada Inc.She remains an executive committee member of the international private client group.
In the Canadian post she succeeded Bill Packham, who had been the division's chief operating officer for two years and was recently named its vice chairman.
Ms. Dabarno joined Merrill Lynch in 1998 when it bought Midland Walwyn of Toronto, where she had worked for two years, first as president of its Atlas Mutual Funds then as the executive vice president of the company's wealth management group. Before that she had worked at Canada Trust for 20 years.
Gerard Aquilina succeeded Ms. Dabarno in the sales and marketing job in the international private client group. He also remains the head of Merrill Lynch International Trust Services, a post he has held since April of last year.
Mr. Aquilina had been the London-based managing director of marketing for Merrill Lynch International Bank and Merrill Lynch Bank Suisse. He had joined the international banking unit in 1984 as the specialist private banking team leader for Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Before that he had been a Merrill business director in Brazil, where he had been in charge of the company's Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro offices for 11 years.
Before joining Merrill he had been a First Chicago investment banker in London and a practicing international attorney.
Ms. Dabarno and Mr. Aquilina report to Winthrop H. Smith Jr., chairman of Merrill Lynch International and president of the international private client group.
WEST City National Bank of Beverly Hills, Calif., has hired Kenna Helms as senior vice president and manager of its Palo Alto, Calif., private banking team.She was a vice president and senior trust officer overseeing California trust administration activities for Comerica Inc. Before that she had held a similar position at Wells Fargo & Co.
Ms. Helms has 26 years of experience in trusts, estate planning, and financial services. Earlier she had been chief counsel at the U.S. Leasing Corp. and at Bank of America's office of general counsel.
