Premier Banking and Investments, Gabe Chambers

In 2002 Gabe was recruited by Bank of America to become the Vice President of Investments for Bank of America's Investment Division (BAI).  The bank had recently changed its name (from Nations Bank) and needed a determined, intelligent, and street smart advisor to help renovate an investment group that was losing money.  Gabe quickly segmented the opportunities and attacked the low lying fruit first.  He first met with the client facing department heads in the bank to determine what potential was available for an investment cross sell.  The greatest opportunity was in the Premier and Private Banking departments.  These groups had relationships with clients under their care and could easily approach their client list and ask for appointments.  Initially Gabe began to generate clients under the care of many bankers, but quickly realized if he had an exclusive relationship with a couple of good bankers, he could maximize every opportunity, so Gabe approached two very good bankers and began an exclusive relationship with them.  All the banking business of his clients would be run through these two bankers and any investment opportunity this book generated would come to him.  In the banking industry only 1% of clients have investment accounts.  In the Premier and Private space it was closer to 15%.  The bankers that Gabe worked with had a nearly 70% investment participation rate.  Obviously the more wallet share they captured the more pleased the clients were with the services and the harder it was for them to leave, so he spent the first several years perfecting the model.  Quickly his numbers caught up with his ideas and work ethic, and the bank wanted to find out what he was doing that other advisors could emulate.  The bank decided Gabe’s success was the result of developing relationships with other bank departments.  The bank tried to encourage advisors to team with bankers, but it was difficult for advisors to give up clients and take on an exclusive arrangement with a banker.  There was much distrust in the organization across the silos the bank had created, but the old way of doing business was obviously not working, so Premier Banking and Investments (PB&I) was born.

PB&I was a partnership between bankers and investment advisors that created a team approach that would provide solutions to each client’s financial needs. With this combination Gabe began to develop products that were banking and investment related. Products that catered to the nature of the markets they were investing in, and would suit the needs of the banks clients. Within a year the number of clients in Premier Banking and Investments increased by over 40%, but customer satisfaction began to decline, yet Gabe’s customer satisfaction scores remained high. So his team was called to develop a system that would help advisors triage their existing books and stay in contact with their clients at a rate that the advisor could maintain and the clients would feel the relationship remained copacetic. The system classified clients, recognized stake holders for opportunities and assigned tasks to those stake holders to maximize opportunities. It also provided ongoing feedback about the condition of the relationship based on contact records.

Still not satisfied with the level of cross penetration, Gabe began conducting cross sales meetings. In these meetings Gabe would lead off summarizing a dozen key relationships, and have each of the 15-20 product specialists comment on how they might be able to expand the relationship utilizing their products. Among Gabe’s clients were many key decision makers, CEOs and CFOs of the major corporations and large business owners around Dallas. With the banks product offering he decided to increase the footprint of the bank exponentially, leveraging those relationships. He began to cross sell at an alarming rate. The division quickly picked up this concept and began to propel their business in such a way that by the time Gabe left, the loss leading advisory division was now earning over $2 billion dollars in revenue annually. Were PB&I to divest from Bank of America, it would be the 10th largest bank in the United States, and the 4th in terms of profitability.