Cetera hires Schwab exec as new national sales head

Mark Palmer, a Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. executive, today was named national sales manager at Cetera Financial Group, the broker-dealer network owned by private-equity firm Lightyear Capital LLC. The position is new. Mr. Palmer will oversee Cetera’s advisory services sales and training, and will report to fellow Schwab alumnus and former senior managing director of strategic business development Barnaby Grist, who is now executive vice president of wealth management at Cetera. Mr. Palmer, 44, has spent the past four years as managing director of business consulting. In that capacity, he built Schwab’s consulting services to give registered investment advisers strategic-planning services and business development strategies. Mr. Palmer’s hiring comes two months after the firm hired Susan Theder as its chief marketing officer. Ms. Theder previously was managing director of global marketing at Pershing LLC. Mr. Grist has said that one of his goals is to attract more hybrid advisers to Cetera. “Not only are we bringing perspectives on best practices for recruiting from wirehouses, but we believe that this organization is ideally designed to attract the different segments within a wirehouse, which is something that drew us to Cetera,” Mr. Grist said in an interview with InvestmentNews this June. Cetera is made up of three broker-dealer firms purchased from ING Groep NV: Financial Network Investment Corp., Multi-Financial Securities Corp. and PrimeVest Financial Services Inc. “Historically, independent broker-dealers have focused their recruiting efforts within [the independent-broker-dealer] space,” Mr. Grist said. “In our prior environments, the efforts we led were focused on helping wirehouse reps become independent. The fact is, this is a tremendous opportunity for Cetera, because in reality, the best move for most wirehouse reps is into a hybrid broker-dealer firm.”