By James Langton
(September 20 – 9:00 ET) – A siege mentality is gripped the retail securities industry professionals that gathered in Chicago last week for the Securities Industry Association’s retail management conference.
Presentations at the SIA conference were rife with combat metaphors. Yesterday, Wick Simmons, popular chief executive of New York’s Prudential Securities Inc., argued that the future of the retail business will be a “combination attack” involving cyberspace and so-called “land forces,” the traditional financial advisor.
Today, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. Inc. analyst Henry McVey spoke of the retail financial services business in terms of “attackers,” “defenders,” and “arms dealers.”
Attackers are represented by the online brokers such as E*Trade Group, Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., and Ameritrade. The defenders are the traditional firms such as Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Prudential. The arms dealers are the alternative trading systems such as Instinet and Island, information providers such as Reuters and Bloomberg, and others including Yahoo! and global custody giant State Street Co.
While the metaphors may have been overblown, they do highlight the level of fear and uncertainty about the future of retail financial services, particularly in the U.S., but inevitably in Canada too.