Asian Mission
Wells Fargo & Co. is funding a study of Asian-American business owners with the aim of providing them with better service.
The $1.3 trillion-asset San Francisco company has given $208,000 to the U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce Education Foundation in Washington to study the characteristics and interests of business owners among six different Asian-American groups: Chinese, Asian Indian, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese.
"We're trying to learn the differences between the groups, and how the characteristics of their cultural orientations affect the challenges they face when trying to bring their businesses into the mainstream and grow their businesses," said Patrick Yalung, regional president for the Wells' D.C. region and national spokesman for the company's Asian business services.
The foundation intends to use the study's findings to develop educational initiatives to help mentor new businesses, as well as help regional businesses expand into national concerns, said Susan Au Allen, its chief executive.
Settling in at B of A
Sallie Krawcheck is working hard to fit in at Bank of America.
On Wednesday the Charlotte company's new head of global wealth and investment management bought 63,000 shares of stock in her new employer, paying roughly $1 million for the stake, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And in a video message to Bank of America Corp.'s 15,000 financial advisers last week, she presented herself as the perfect bridge between B of A's roots in the South and the Wall Street culture at Merrill Lynch & Co. Most of the company's advisers came over when B of A bought the New York investment bank Jan. 1.
"I'm a Southerner by birth, but a Northerner for some number of years," Krawcheck said, according to a B of A spokeswoman and a company employee who saw the video. "I'm a huge college basketball fan, particularly the University of North Carolina." Krawcheck grew up in Charleston, S.C.
RBS Hires CFO
Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC has hired Bruce Van Saun as its chief financial officer to round out its senior management team. Van Saun, a former Bank of New York Mellon Corp. CFO who most recently served as an adviser to U.S. private-equity firms, officially joins RBS on Oct. 1.
RBS, which was partially nationalized by the U.K. government last year, operates branches in the United States under the Citizens and Charter One brands. Van Saun, who was CFO at Deutsche Bank North America before joining Bank of New York in 1997, will be succeeding Guy Whittaker, a Citigroup veteran who joined RBS in 2006 and whose retirement was announced in May.
