Rockefeller Capital Management is adding another brokerage executive to its ranks this spring.
Joe Ferlisi, a longtime wirehouse executive and the chief technology officer of Global Banking and Markets at Bank of America's Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, is departing to join Rockefeller and become its first chief information officer in May. He will spearhead innovation, technology and information strategy and architecture, and data security across all parts of the business, Rockefeller said in a statement on Monday.
Rockefeller President and CEO Gregory Fleming said Ferlisi is "one of the most experienced technology leaders in the industry" and was the architect of many widely used platforms in the wealth management industry.
Among his responsibilities, Ferlisi will be in charge of the new Rockefeller Global Family Office platform that will cater to ultra-high-net-worth families, typically defined as those with a net worth of at least $30 million. Timothy O’Hara, who spent more than 20 years and was president and CEO of Ayco, a prominent family office and wealth-planning business owned by Goldman Sachs, is also set to join Rockefeller in May as president of Rockefeller's multifamily office.
After 17 years at Merrill Lynch, Ferlisi became the CTO of field and client technology for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management from 2013 to 2016. He later returned to Merrill Lynch for the past two and a half years.
Along with executives, Rockefeller has proved to be an attractive landing place for financial advisors. Among others, a group of former Merrill Lynch advisors in Atlanta joined a pair from UBS managing $2.2 billion that opened a Rockefeller office in Georgia's capital in December. The company has offices in New York, Atlanta, Boston, Washington D.C., Salt Lake City and Wilmington, Del.
A year ago, Fleming told WealthManagement.com that he wanted to grow the advisory firm to $100 billion in assets in the next five years and believed the Rockefeller name would help get him there, particularly in generating new business outside the United States.
