Following the Money

When she started the group, Barry hired Chopra to head up the South Asian effort and later added Mario J. Paredes, who spent 27 years as a financial adviser to Roman Catholic institutions, to help target Latinos. (Barry now has a staff of about 13 and a budget of about $5 million.)

Paredes has focused much of his attention on Washington, especially Latinos in the diplomatic corps and at financial organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank. Paredes said Merrill also has a strong relationship with Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop of Washington. McCarrick addressed a Merrill conference in New Jersey last summer. (Barry affectionately refers to him as "Father Ted.") In churches around the area, Paredes said, Merrill often translates its work for the parish into business with wealthy church members. There is never a hard sell after Mass, just casual relationship-building.

Paredes also has pushed Merrill to hire more Hispanic brokers. When he joined the firm four years ago, Paredes said, Merrill had 200 Latino financial advisers. Now it has 550.

In the South Asian market in Washington, Merrill has developed a relationship with Tie-DC, a networking group for Indian and other South Asian executives from Northern Virginia.

The sponsorship gets Merrill advisers into Tie functions, such as a lunch last year with a top economic minister from India. Merrill executives, including Barry, often attend Tie events and take prospective clients out for dinner afterward. "We have a number of members whose wealth is now entirely managed by Merrill," said Tanya Gridhar, executive director of Tie-DC.

Other brokerage firms are also scrambling to keep up with the changing face of wealth. Citigroup Inc.'s Smith Barney brokerage unit follows an approach similar to Merrill's, sponsoring cultural events, such as a recent exhibit of Mayan textiles in San Francisco, to meet potential new clients. "In everything we do, we try to tie it into Latin American culture," said Octavio Sacasa, manager of Smith Barney's Hispanic initiative.

Smith Barney also has been holding seminars for wealthy black investors. Mindy S. Ross, managing director of Smith Barney's target market initiatives group, said she recently held seven hours' worth of focus groups with wealthy African Americans in Washington, including lawyers, professional athletes and others.

Lately, Ross said, Smith Barney, like many brokerage firms, has grown concerned with its aging client base. So she has focused on wealthy women and their adult daughters, positioning the firm to benefit from the huge transfer of wealth expected to occur in the next several decades. (The Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, formerly the Social Welfare Research Institute, predicts at least $41 trillion will shift from one generation to the next over the next 50 years.)

While Merrill gets plaudits for its recent work, the firm was not the first to tap the wealth of upwardly mobile immigrants. Discount broker Charles Schwab Corp. broke new ground in 1989 with toll-free numbers for investors in Cantonese and Mandarin and new branches in San Francisco's Chinatown and other big Chinese American communities.

Schwab focused on overcoming cultural barriers among first-generation immigrants by holding seminars to explain U.S. financial markets and the nature of investing to potential clients more accustomed to keeping money in cash or in banks run by other Chinese.

Wallace Louie, a Schwab marketing executive and son of Chinese immigrants, said the effort has brought in $10 billion in new assets. And it has grown to include the creation of a Chinese-language trading Web site and marketing efforts to Korean Americans and Vietnamese Americans. As Schwab's immigrant clients have grown wealthier, many have moved from cities to suburbs. Schwab has opened new branches to follow them.

Barry knows she does not have the field to herself. At a recent meeting with Merrill employees, she stressed that diversity was no longer just the mantra of human resource executives but a business imperative. She ticked off handful of upcoming events where Merrill would try spread the brand, including a Native American art exhibit featuring Wilma P. Mankiller, the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. (Native Americans flush with casino wealth are particularly attractive to Wall Street.)

Finally, Barry expressed her most fervent wish: to shut her unit down. "If we do this right, you won't need a separate group up on the shelf anymore," she said. "I want you all to put me out of business in 10 years."

As for the Christie's event, Chopra said that it has already produced one new million-dollar account and that she expects several more.