RBC Wealth Management’s Head of Family Office Services is now running its insurance arm
Anthony Maiorino is now wearing two hats. The Vice President, Director, and Head of RBC Family Office Services was recently named President & CEO of RBC Wealth Management Financial Services Inc. Now Maiorino presides over two wings of the RBC Wealth Management business held in kind of personal union, with the Family Office Services business focused on the management of highly complex clients and the Financial Services side offering insurance solutions to RBC Wealth Management clients. While the two business lines will be kept separate under Maiorino’s leadership, he sees this as a chance to deepen the service that his firm provides to all their clients.
Maiorino positioned himself as a source of greater continuity between those two businesses. He hopes to offer a perspective that can allow RBC Wealth Management to better integrate insights and ideas from both the family office and insurance sides of their business. He explained how this idea of continuity can serve RBC Wealth Management’s advisors and clients in a crowded competitive landscape where ‘holistic service’ has become the watchword.
“It's a function of understanding the planning side, which is the things that the clients are looking for, and then connecting that into the agency business to determine how we present this to clients in a way that connects to the planning and solves the problem that that family might have. I think those two things go really well together,” Maiorino says. “Because that's extensively what I've been doing on the family office side, bringing that same logic and infrastructure over to the Wealth Management Financial Services side, the agency business, is also going to be really key for our future growth plans.”
Solving for acute client challenges
Maiorino stresses that his new combined role builds on an existing foundation of collaboration between himself and his predecessor in the RBC Wealth Management Financial Services role, John Hamilton. Because family office services often focus on tax and estate planning, collaboration with the insurance side of the business has been essential. Maiorino wants to continue that work to tackle some of the key challenges he sees clients and advisors facing.
Estate liability is among the first challenges Maiorino wants to address. As the great intergenerational wealth transfer continues, families with significant net worth are accruing massive tax liabilities that will have to be paid by the inheritor generation. Business owners, in particular, need structures that can manage those tax liabilities on the dispersal of their businesses.
Maiorino wants to use the institutional knowledge accrued on both the family office and insurance sides of RBC Wealth Management to show clients the range of options available to them. He emphasizes the power of storytelling and example and wants to equip RBC Wealth Management advisors with those stories that can demonstrate how to manage these moments. Those stories and examples, he says, can give clients clear choices about what they want to do, allowing them informed independence in their decision making.
Making RBC advisors stand out
In his experience on the family office side of wealth management, Maiorino has seen how specific and technical the problems facing client families can be. The solution, he says, is to offer a wide range of specialist services that can support advisors at the firm. He likens this model to healthcare, with the advisor functioning as the general practitioner who refers out to specialists as needed. In his dual role, Maiorino wants to continue building out a bench of in-house specialists in areas like tax, estate, charitable giving, and financial literacy education. He also wants to build a rolodex of external specialists, in areas like physical health or cybersecurity, who can help in matters where RBC doesn’t have direct expertise.
When asked about his role in the competitive landscape for client assets, Maiorino focused on those service offerings as a route to greater client satisfaction. He says that he and his team don’t view these decisions with a view to capturing more business from competitors, instead they want clients to know that they’re doing things the right way.
“Every client at some point has that moment where they ask themselves, ‘am I doing this the right way?’ What we're focused on is when that question comes up that that client looks around and sees RBC and has heard, has read, has seen that that's the place to be,” Maiorino says. “We're really focused on doing the best that we can for our advisors and our clients. And obviously, we're keeping abreast of what everybody else is doing. We're not naive in that perspective, and we see great things everywhere, but we are focused on how do we put something together that our clients will go, wow, this is exactly where I need to be.”
