Struggling New York banking giant Citigroup Inc. today named Deborah Doyle McWhinney managing director and head of the bank’s newly created Citi Personal Wealth Management unit, which will include roughly 600 financial advisers already in place in retail bank branches throughout the country.
Ms. McWhinney is best known for her seven-year tenure at San Francisco-based Charles Schwab Institutional. She retired as president of Charles Schwab Institutional in 2007.
She is being brought to Citigroup to build up the bank’s investing services as Citi prepares for the spinoff of its Smith Barney brokerage unit into a joint venture with New York-based Morgan Stanley later this year.
“My goal is to work in conjunction with Citi’s bank branches and build and deliver the best wealth management services in the country,” Ms. McWhinney said.
Those services will include investment and banking products, insurance and financial planning.
Ms. McWhinney said she viewed the bank’s brand as a strength upon which to build the wealth management business.
She cited the need to “listen and remain flexible” in the current economic and investing climate.
“None of us have had to respond to how investors are feeling in this environment,” Ms. McWhinney said.
After retiring from Schwab, she served as CEO and president of the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation. Prior to that, Ms. McWhinney served on Schwab's Management Committee, on the boards of the Charles Schwab Bank NA and the Charles Schwab Foundation, and as chairwoman of the Global Risk Committee.
Before joining Schwab, she was an executive vice president at Visa International and spent the preceding 17 years with Bank of America Corp. of Charlotte, N.C.
In 2002, President Bush appointed Ms. McWhinney to the board of the Washington-based Securities Investor Protection Corp.
She is a past chairwoman of the University of Montana Foundation's board of trustees and in 2007 and was elected to the California Institute of Technology board of trustees.
