"I refuse to believe that good old-fashioned stockbrokerage is dead," says Mr. Berlin, the new director of private client services at New York City investment bank C.E. Unterberg Towbin.
Mr. Berlin, 46, joined Unterberg last summer after spending 17 years at
CIBC Oppenheimer, where he ran the Park Avenue office. While many fellow stockbrokers have been wringing their hands over the threat posed by online trading, Mr. Berlin believes there is still demand for top-notch financial advice.
"Very wealthy people are very busy people, and they're not going to be e-trading all day," says Mr. Berlin, whose wife, Meredith, is a former editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine. "They want a financial shepherd who can get them into the right things and keep them out of the wrong ones."
He'll be building a business essentially from scratch. Best known for taking Intel Corp. public in the 1970s, Unterberg has undergone several makeovers, but its business has always revolved around corporate finance and institutional sales. The company ranked 25th nationally in the underwriting of initial public offerings through September, according to Thomson Financial Securities Data.
Mr. Berlin's mandate is to build a retail brokerage operation that will serve executives of Unterberg's corporate clients, as well as wealthy individuals looking to invest in the firm's
private equity deals, hedge funds and IPOs.
Unterberg is essentially stealing a page from the playbooks of Alex. Brown and Montgomery Securities, both of which got into retail brokerage and money management by exploiting their investment banking contacts. After taking companies public, the two firms offered investment services to the corporate executives who had been enriched by the IPOs.
Yet Unterberg is starting the strategy at a time of intense competition among brokers and money managers for rich investors.
Working his contacts
"Jordan Berlin is a man with a great deal of experience and contacts," says Nancy Miller, an executive search consultant with Mark Elzweig Co. specializing in placing retail brokers. "But I think it's going to be extremely difficult to leverage those (corporate finance) relationships."
Mr. Berlin expects to hire as many as 20 veteran brokers, including some from big-name brokerage houses such as Oppenheimer, Merrill Lynch and Salomon Smith Barney. He's offering them a chance to become equity partners in closely held Unterberg, in addition to the opportunity to invest in the firm's
IPO and
venture capital deals.
The firm is targeting experienced brokers who feel that they've been increasingly asked to spend their time selling mutual funds, financial plans and other cookie-cutter products.
People who worked with Mr. Berlin at Oppenheimer describe him as a skilled recruiter, but some say he promised more in terms of pay and administrative support than Oppenheimer could actually deliver.
"If you work as a manager long enough, there are always going to be some people who complain," Mr. Berlin responds.
