TD names new head of practice management

TD Ameritrade on Monday named Christine Gaze director of practice management for its institutional unit, which provides services for independent registered advisers. Ms. Gaze replaces Michael Watson, who left TD Ameritrade Institutional last year to become senior vice president of business consulting at LPL Financial. Ms. Gaze is responsible for developing and implementing all adviser practice management and business consulting services for TD Ameritrade Institutional. Specifically, she will focus on building and maintaining practice management programs intended to help RIAs build their businesses. Ms. Gaze, who officially started working at TD Ameritrade Institutional two weeks ago, is approaching her new role very "methodically," she said. She has already charged her team at TD Ameritrade Institutional with the task of analyzing what the firm's competitors offer in the practice management area. "I'm looking for some inside baseball with regard to what's going on," she said. "It's important that my team always have a finger on the pulse of what's happening in practice management." In her most recent role, Ms. Gaze served as executive director at Morgan Stanley Private Bank where she led new business development initiatives aimed at helping advisers cultivate relationships with high net worth investors. Prior to that, she helped build the practice management consulting group for Wachovia Securities. “Christine started her career as an adviser providing financial planning for wealthy families,” Zohar Swaine, managing director of product and strategy at TD Ameritrade Institutional, said in a statement. “She's spent the last decade researching best practices of top advisory teams, sharing insights and coaching financial advisers to take their businesses to the next level.”