Wilmington Trust has hired a former Bank One Corp. executive to help develop cross-selling in its wealth management business.
It named Peter W. Atwater Tuesday to be a senior vice president and the head of relationship management in its wealth advisory business. Mr. Atwater, 43, once was an executive in the private-client services group at Bank One and had also been the parent company's treasurer during his six years with the Chicago company.
His hiring signals a new stage in the growth strategy at Wilmington Trust, which has been opening offices throughout the East and in California.
"The opportunity is to grow with the clients we have rather than looking to open additional locations," Mr. Atwater said. "I think there [are] obvious opportunities in the markets in New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. We are in a lot of right places already."
For several years the Delaware banking company's growth plan was built around opening offices and making acquisitions.
It has opened offices since 2001 in California, Delaware, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. And starting in January 1998, when it bought a stake in Cramer Rosenthal McGlynn, a White Plains, N.Y., value manager with $3.2 billion of assets under management, it has waged an aggressive buying campaign.
In July 1998 it bought a stake in Roxbury Capital Management, a Los Angeles growth manager, which also managed $3.2 billion. In January 2002, it bought Balentine & Co., an Atlanta investment consulting firm, and last month closed its deal for Grant Tani Barash & Altman, a Beverly Hills family-office services provider.
Mr. Atwater said Wilmington will look to grow by expanding the business it does with existing clients. Opportunities to cross-sell arise from some of the purchases the company has made in recent years, he said.
"With the acquisition of Balentine we got a great asset manager, but there are significant opportunities to introduce trust services to those clients," he said. "And the acquisition of Grant Tani gave us a strong family-office firm, and we can introduce those services to other markets and other clients that we serve today."
The banking company began its initiative for organic growth in September when Robert Balentine was promoted from running Wilmington's Atlanta office to heading its investment management group.
In a September interview Mr. Balentine said he expected the group, which managed $33.9 billion at Sept. 30, to add several billion dollars a year by growing organically. He said he expected the company to do this by building its investment consulting business; adding to its family-office, foundation, and endowments group; and developing external distribution with institutional customers.
The investment management group has beaten its sales goals in recent years, adding $20 million to $25 million a year in revenue from new business since 2002, but analysts said the acquisitions have not generated the type of growth that Wilmington had hoped for. Assets under management have grown 16.9% since the end of 2002, including 2% this year.
Rodney P. Wood, an executive vice president in Wilmington Trust's wealth advisory unit, said in a press release that Mr. Atwater's experience in private-client services will help the company.
Mr. Atwater was chief executive officer of Bank One Private Client Services Group until June 2003 when he joined Juniper Financial Corp., a unit of Wilmington Trust, as a managing director and chief financial officer.
He said he left Bank One after Jamie Dimon, who was then chief executive, decided to break out the private-client services group into its own unit.
Wilmington decided to sell Juniper six months after Mr. Atwater joined it, and when the deal closed at the beginning of this month, he was hired by Wilmington. He said he is confident that Wilmington can maintain its momentum and expand organically.
