Wealth management

Retirees are some of the biggest financial advice customers, coming to wealth managers for help with reverse mortgages, annuities — and even vacations.

Acquisitions in which an asset manager buys a unit from a financial services company are likely to be a continuing theme in the industry.

Wells Fargo Advisors, a unit of Wells Fargo & Co., is no longer letting its advisers sell leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds through advisory accounts.

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When Bryn Mawr Trust Co. of Pennsylvania established a limited-purpose trust company in Delaware a year ago, the top executives of the two outfits hoped it would generate $250 million of assets under advisement in its first year.

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Second-quarter individual annuity sales fell 9%, to $60.5 billion, from the three months before, and 11% from a year earlier, according to a Limra International survey.

Six years ago Trustmark National Bank of Jackson, Miss., had a nice complement of wealth management businesses — trust brokerage, private banking and even a registered investment adviser.

Not many clients can invest in a fund that regularly beats the Standard & Poor's 500 index, with less risk, and enjoy the ability to call the managers' cell whenever they want. But that combination of acumen and access has helped Brock Kidd become an $830,000 producer at the $5 billion-asset Pinnacle National Bank in Nashville.

Asset managers expect it will take four to seven years to recover the assets under management lost during the recession, according to McKinsey & Co.

Changes in federal tax laws that take effect next year give high-income earners planning for retirement a decision to make: pay now or pay later.

Scotiabank Group in Toronto has introduced a suite of insurance products and services.

Retirement plan participants appear to be regaining confidence in equity investments, according to quarterly data released Tuesday by MassMutual Financial Group's retirement services division.

City National Bank in Los Angeles announced that it had hired Logan Allin to be a senior vice president and the manager of business and operations strategy for its wealth management division.

Julie Castle, the president of the wealth management arm at First Interstate BancSystem in Billings, Mont., said she was worried at the beginning of the year that the unit might become another casualty of poor economic conditions.

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When the asset manager Neuberger Berman Group was sold to Lehman Brothers Holdings in 2003, the leaders of Neuberger's trust unit figured they could reap a lot of new business from wealthy Lehman clients.

If M&A had a lemon law, the sovereign wealth funds could make a pretty good case for the U.S. courts.

Advisers are leaving the biggest wire houses to work at banks, regional brokerage firms and independent advisory companies at a more rapid pace than in January, according to a report from the research firm Discovery Database.

Thomas A. Banus, a former broker with Citigroup Global Markets Inc., alleges that Citigroup offered him a signing bonus of $45,675.36 structured as a forgivable loan over seven years when he joined the bank in October 2004.