Top 5 Q3 Trends at Merrill Wealth Management

3. A growing number of Merrill advisors are CFPs.

Almost 4,000 of the 18,841 advisors hold the certified financial planner designation, the company pointed out.

4. The firm continues to enhance its digital offerings for advisors and clients.

The firm's recently launched Merrill Advisor Match digital platform was introduced in the quarter, modernizing the process of finding an advisor for prospective clients. There are now 5,500 advisors enrolled in that offering, the company said.

Meanwhile, the company's Collaborative Onboarding Experience, launched last year, is providing a fully digitized client account opening experience and about 33% of all eligible accounts were opened digitally in Q3, it said.

The company's Mobile Advisor Experience (MAX), launched in 2021, gives advisors access to a full range of workstation features while they are on the go, the company said, noting it's been used almost 1 million times so far in 2022.

Also, 80% of Merrill households are now digitally active across the enterprise, while 375,000 households exchanged about 1.3 million secure messages in Q3 and a record 77% households were enrolled in eDelivery.

Meanwhile, in BofA Private Bank, 86% of clients were digitally active across the enterprise in Q3, the firm said. Clients are increasingly leveraging the company's digital capabilities, it said, reporting record Erica AI interactions, up 62% from a year earlier; record Zelle transactions, up 41%; and record digital wallet transactions, up 63%.

5. Diversity is improving among advisor trainees.

It was "still early" and too soon to say what the success rate will be of the firm's revamped advisor training program, Sieg said in response to a ThinkAdvisor question. There's another six months to go before the initial recruits complete the program, he noted.

But minority representation is up. Forty-five percent of the new recruits are "people of color," Sieg said.

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