Certus Wealth’s leaders aim to avoid the “silo mentality”
At Charles M. Williams’ going-away party from Solomon Brothers to join NationsBank, Robert Hogan, who had joined the New York firm about the same time in the early 1990s, approached him.
“I came up to him and said, ‘I’ll see you in a week, because they just recruited me too.’”
Hogan and Williams had been induced to come to Charlotte to help NationsBank, which later became Bank of America, build out an investment bank. They did well. Hogan became chief operations manager for BOA Securities, Williams chairman and president of BOA’s overseas and financial corporations.
After nearly 10 years at BOA, Hogan left in 2005 to create a wealth-management division for Capital Bank Corp., a business that reached “about $1.5 billion in assets under management.”
Meanwhile, Williams left BOA in 2008 to form, with other former colleagues, Blue Ridge Holdings (now CertusHoldings) to create a new bank out of the debris of the economic collapse. They raised $500 million to build what became CertusBank.
CertusBank now has full-service banks in the Upstate, Georgia and northern Florida. It has assets of $2 billion with ambition to grow much larger as a regional Southeastern bank.
Even before Certus had a single teller, Williams, Certus’ co-CEO, asked Hogan in 2010 “to come on board” to build a wealth-management division for Certus from scratch.
“We put down a platform in record-breaking time, faster than what I had done in my last life at Capital Bank Corp., and even more robust,” said Hogan in an interview.
“Now we are starting to see that grow, and it is growing rapidly.”
With the advantage of starting fresh and knowing the weaknesses of large and cumbersome institutions, Certus Wealth set out to attract a wide range of clients – from the ultra rich to the just plain wealthy boomer and from the mid-income, midlife family to the early-career 27-year-old.
By bringing younger people into its wealth-management orbit, Certus will be in a position to have their business when they are older, have more wealth and are in need of deeper money management services, Hogan said.
As a fundamental underpinning, Hogan said, Certus is structured to avoid the silo mentality of large banks, where “they go after the client with one sole purpose, and that is to sell their product. Their second purpose is to provide great service,” Hogan said.
Taking a “product-agnostic” approach, he said, Certus Wealth will “deliver anyone’s product. We can deliver our product, but we can deliver Fidelity’s. We can deliver all of them, and we can deliver at the same price point as the big players.”
“What we have done is not put sales forces in the various product areas. We just put product experts in these spots.”
By removing incentive to steer clients to Certus products, “you create an opportunity to be the trusted adviser,” Hogan said. “Here is the special sauce: It comes down to not creating conflicts.”
Certus also has a range of entry levels of investable assets to qualify for wealth management. At the low end is no minimum for, say, the 27-year-old.
For more traditional wealth management for, say, a boomer at or nearing retirement, the minimum is $100,000 “to attract the person turned away” from institutions that want customers with far more in assets.
For a person with around $5 million, Certus bought an interest in Monarch Business and Wealth Management, a national firm founded by Barry Klarberg to manage financial affairs of the ultra rich, most notably sports and entertainment superstars.
“This is where you want to operate as somebody’s personal CFO. You want to instruct them on estate planning, on taxes, business decisions. You want to handle their bill-pay. You want to do all these services for them, leading with advice, not product.”
