Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

“Lindsay and I continue to see this commitment to clients and growth firsthand,” he told reporters. “We’re seeing it firsthand as we’re out on the road meeting with our teammates, our advisors, our client associates, market executives and our specialists.” So far, the two of them “have been in over 20 markets, from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Palo Alto, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, and many others,” he noted. “And this has really proven to be valuable time and it’s helped us even further inform our thoughts around strategy.” 4. Merrill’s new strategy has three pillars. “Pillar number one is that we will deliver more for our clients that will deepen,” Hans said. “Pillar number two is we’re going to increase our growth and investment in our advisors. And, number three, we’ve got to continue this pace at which we’re attracting new clients.” 5. Five trends will have a major impact on the U.S. wealth management sector. Hans highlighted what she said are “5 key trends” that Merrill thinks will “define and shape wealth management in this country going forward.” The first is that the “pace of wealth creation in this country is not going to slow down,” she said. Second, “we see technology...

“Professionals hired to come up with [company] names typically [present] a thousand ideas. It’s not just an afternoon of brainstorming and leaving the room with 10 good ideas. It’s … scratching beneath the surface,” Rob Meyerson, founder and principal of Heirloom, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview. The independent brand strategist was formerly head of naming at Hewlett-Packard and director of verbal identity at Interbrand. In the interview, he argues that building a brand requires striking a balance “between fitting in and standing out.” Further, he discusses the pros and cons of creating an original name for a financial advisory versus using the founder’s own name. His clients have ranged from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500 firms, including Activision, AT&T, Intel, Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where many of his technology clients are located, Meyerson also talks about the good and bad reasons for renaming a firm and opines on Riskalyze changing its name to Nitrogen. Author of “Brand Naming: The Complete Guide to Creating a Name for Your Company, Product or Service,” Meyerson has a new book due in the fourth quarter or early 2024: the 6th edition of the Amazon bestseller, “Designing...

Charles Schwab is giving thousands of employees a reprieve from a recently announced return-to-office mandate as it moves instead to to shut U.S. offices in five cities and downsize in six others. A Schwab spokesperson confirmed Friday that company offices will be closing Oct. 1 in Atlanta, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis and Tampa, and that the firm has told employees its offices are being reduced in size at single locations in Boston; Henderson, Nevada; Jersey City, New Jersey; and San Francisco; as well as at two spots in Chicago. The smaller locations will remain in place or be moved to nearby areas. “In an effort to efficiently use resources to support our clients, our employees, and our stockholders, we have evaluated our real estate footprint,” the spokesperson said in a statement supplied to ThinkAdvisor Friday afternoon. “We will close some of our smaller locations with modest levels of in-office attendance or reduce or move our footprint in others,” the spokesman explained. “There are no changes to our larger centers and corporate campuses or to our branch footprint.” The spokesperson added: “There will be no impact to client service. Employees assigned to a closing location will move to full-time remote work and employees in...

Welcome to SEC Roundup, a bimonthly video series by former Securities and Exchange Commission senior trial counsels Nick Morgan and Tom Zaccaro, founders of the nonprofit advocacy group Investor Choice Advocates Network. The Supreme Court agreed on June 30 to review a case in which hedge fund principal George Jarkesy has been battling the SEC since it brought an administrative proceeding against him over 10 years ago. Morgan and Zaccaro discuss the case and its broad potential impact with Jarkesy’s lawyers, solo practitoners Karen Cook and Mike McColloch. Jarkesy contends, and a federal appellate court agrees, that the SEC’s administrative proceedings are unconstitutional and deny IAs and others their right to a jury. “It’s a very broken system,” McColloch said. The SEC sets up “these fake courts, I call them fake, inside the agency, administrative law judges … and they put on trials, just like a federal court would, except no right to trial by jury, the rules of evidence don’t apply, to the extent they ever do, they only apply in favor of the SEC and you lose 100% of the time,” McColloch said. “By and large it’s a kangaroo court.” See the video above for the discussion with Cook...

Dimensional Fund Advisors has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow its mutual funds to offer exchange-traded fund share classes — a structure that the Vanguard Group has offered exclusively for more than two decades. If the SEC approves the request, DFA could be the first firm to adopt the arrangement since Vanguard’s patent on it expired in May. DFA said it believes the multi-class structure “will allow investors to choose the manner in which they wish to hold interests in a fund based on the share class characteristics that are most important to the investor.” Vanguard, working under SEC orders that allowed it to offer ETFs from mutual fund shares since the early 2000s, “has become one of the major sponsors of index-based ETFs, with more than $2 trillion in assets invested through exchange-traded classes, representing almost 30% of all ETF assets in the United States,” DFA noted in its application. ”Vanguard funds with exchange-traded classes also have more than $2.7 trillion in assets invested through their mutual fund classes.“