Bank of America Exec Addresses RIIA Annual Meeting
September 29, 2008
At their 2008 annual meeting in Boston September 21 and 22, the Retirement Income Industry Association’s leaders reported on their organization’s progress toward its principal goals: creating a retirement distribution methodology, establishing a professional designation for retirement specialists, and identifying “cross-silo” solutions that reduce financial risk through insurance, diversification, and/or hedging.
Additional presenters included Bank of America’s managing director, Planning and Investment Products Group, Dan McNamara; Christopher Raham, director of Ernst & Young’s Retirement Income practice; and Michael Colon, chief operating officer of DWS Investments. York University professor Moshe Milevsky, author of the new personal finance book, “Are You a Stock or a Bond?” received a lifetime achievement award by RIIA.
In reporting on Bank of America’s activity in the retirement space, McNamara said that while “retirement and IRAs were not even on the Bank of America website a year ago,” the bank became much more retirement-oriented when it hired Jeffrey Carney, a Fidelity veteran, to be president of its Retirement and Global Wealth and Investment Management in July 2007.
Since then, Bank of America’s site has added online advice, self-directed brokerage operations, a larger help desk for retirement income inquiries, and the creation of four customer niches, one for each financial life stage: Starting Out, On Your Way, Pre-Retirement, and New Retirement. “We’ll have more robust planning tools and solutions in the months ahead,” McNamara said.
“Merrill Lynch fills an enormous gap for us,” he said about the bank’s recent acquisition of the wirehouse for a price described as 20% of Merrill’s true value. As for the bank’s philosophy on retirement accumulation and distribution, McNamara added, “We’d like to see slower rolldowns in equity [allocations]. We have a series of income models coming out. We also intend to work with our insurance partners to learn more about taking the [living] benefits of annuities and putting them around mutual funds.”
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