Merrill Lynch Investment Managers' approach to the US institutional
market can best be described as nascent. Until two months ago,
there wasn't even anyone charged with the responsibility for
overseeing, developing or even simply describing Merrill's US
institutional business.
In March MLIM president Jeff Peek put Frank Salerno in charge.
He's been at Merrill since mid-1999, when he brought over a big
chunk of Bankers Trust's successful quantitative analysis team.
The message can still sound a bit disjointed. But Salerno, whose
official title is chief operating officer of US institutional
business, is upbeat about the firm's capabilities. "One of the
best-kept secrets in US asset management is just how big Merrill is
in institutional business," he says. "We're said to be a retail
only firm, but we have about $100 billion in assets under
management [$99.7 billion, actually]. That's about one-third of the
total amount of our US assets, yet very few know about it,
including the...
