PNC Financial Services Group Inc. in Pittsburgh has increased the assets in its private banking business with new leadership, a new name, an enhanced sales-oriented culture, and more cross-selling.
Robert Q. Reilly, who took over as the executive vice president of PNC Wealth Management last July, said his unit's assets under management grew by $1 billion in the first quarter and the private bank's revenue rose 10% compared with a year earlier because of the shift in focus.
"We have really built a sales culture here, and that is probably one of the largest factors in our success," he said. "We really worked to get our advisers to recognize that we are part of the big bank."
Mr. Reilly joined the private bank as a deputy executive vice president in 2004 before taking over last July after Joan Gulley was named the executive vice president of retail banking to oversee product management and marketing for the entire bank. For him, cross-selling was an immediate top business development priority.
"Certainly sales was a priority, but we just increased the intensity around it" in July 2005, Mr. Reilly said. "Sales is and more than likely will be the biggest lever for revenue growth. We wanted to increase the intensity around it in order to increase revenues going forward."
He had come to private banking from a post in PNC's corporate banking division, a background that he said helped him pull all the units closer together for better cross-selling.
The private bank, PNC Advisors, was renamed PNC Wealth Management in April, and has begun working closely with the corporate and business banking divisions, as well as with the retail branches to develop business.
"We assembled a coordinated channel management approach," he said. "We have dedicated people on both sides working together to facilitate to customers to show what PNC Wealth Management can offer."
In recent years the private bank has tripled business developed from referrals by the corporate bank, quadrupled business stemming from the business bank, and gotten two-and-a-half to three times more business from branch referrals, Mr. Reilly said.
Analysts said that developing a strong sales-oriented culture is a good idea at the retail level but that a private bank pushing products at its high-net-worth customers could turn them off.
But his assertions about a strong sales culture could be misinterpreted, Mr. Reilly said. "We are not pushing products," he said. "We want to take what we do and make it more recognizable to the existing customers of the bank and PNC Wealth Management. We want to walk them through everything and show them what is available. That is the sales culture here that we are building."
Mr. Reilly said PNC has developed a robust footprint for the private bank in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky, the District of Columbia, Boston, Greenwich, Conn., and Naples and Vero Beach, Fla.
The May 2005 purchase of Riggs National Corp. gave the private bank access to a large, wealthy community in the Washington area, he said.
"We are very high on our footprint, and we see a lot of growth especially in the eastern part of our footprint through Philadelphia and New Jersey as well as an opportunity in Washington," Mr. Reilly said. "We are not, by any means, tapped out there. … there are a lot of opportunities for growth."
