Among the investment houses and brokerage groups honored in Boston Magazine’s February list of top wealth managers in the area, Brian Callow and William Lavelle stood out. Morgan Stanley or UBS or Lincoln Financial names tend to dominate the list, but Callow and Lavelle work for Rockland Trust, a community bank.
Callow specializes in fixed-income analysis and Lavelle’s focus is equity analysis. Both were selected to the list, which was based on a client satisfaction survey of the more than 14,000 wealth managers in the Boston area.
Brian Callow, William Lavelle
Titles: Portfolio Manager
Age: Callow, 40; Lavelle, 38
Experience: Callow, 18 years; Lavelle, 8 years
Top Five fun facts about Brian & Bill:
So how did Rockland Trust build up its wealth management business, anyway?
Lavelle: Basically in late 2003/early 2004 … is when we really started to invest in the people and the systems to really make it a sophisticated money management organization.… We are differentiated, I think, because we have this really significant, strong retail presence, a general community banking presence, and we’ve basically been in the area since 1907. Rockland Trust has been around for over 100 years now, and so we’ve always had this really strong relationship with the community, and more recently it’s manifested in the investment business.
Callow: It took keen foresight from the management of Rockland Trust, [who realized], ‘Wow, we can find a lot of financial solutions and bring a lot of people to their goals by just really harnessing these relationships we have. Anyone that has deposits, or loans, or on the other side just has trusts, let’s all just introduce them to each other.
Was there a particular trigger that got Rockland interested in this idea?
Callow: From a community standpoint, we had a fairly new CEO at the time. They were really taking a look at the footprint, how it’s changed and evolved through the years. So it was a great chance to connect all those goals. We were a bank for so long, we became a real powerhouse in the commercial lending side. Through a lot of those weaker years on the South Shore, when no one would loan, Rockland Trust was [lending] because we were here for so long that we really knew the credits and knew their story. … They basically made investments in those relationships. So they basically saw this as an extension of that.
And you got recognized for your work in 2008, which was a rough year to be in the finance business.
Lavelle: It was nice to have done all the work in 2008 and then have this sort of symbolize the accomplishment and the work that we put into working with our clients… Even though we have this very sophisticated institutional platform that we can use to have people reach those goals, that’s only really one side of it. You have to work with people to explain how it fits into their lives, and make them understand it, because that’s crucial. Because otherwise, it can be an adversarial process.
Callow: We take a lot of time up front and say, ‘What are your objectives with this money?’ And the more we did that and tried to really compartmentalize what they needed for what purposes, we had it properly allocated so that when things went awry [in the credit crisis], they had the right amount of risk of exposure to assets that were more volatile … we got the allocations right, which didn’t make anyone happier [when assets were shrinking], but we were able to explain how they were invested, how it would come back, and that really helped our assets overall. As a group, S&P’s been down 30 percent… but our assets were down about 12 percent in 2008.
Lavelle: A lot of times, the meetings were very tough and we had bad news to deliver, so at least people recognized that we were doing all we could to help them reach their goals.
Do most of your customers come from around Rockland’s bank branch network?
Callow: For the most part, yes. There are some historical trusts that are out of the area, and then we’ve got a lot of snow birds. We’re getting more and more people that are moving to the Floridas and Arizonas of the world. And we’re hoping that it’ll be like the old shampoo commercial: they’ll tell two people, then they’ll tell two people, and they’ll tell two people.
From when I got here, that’s been our word: We’re the best-kept secret on the South Shore, but we’re trying not to be a secret anymore.
Top Five fun facts about Brian & Bill:
- Bill’s educational background is in ancient Greek history; he originally got into finance to help support his academic pursuits.
- Brian is a tri-athlete who finished his first Ironman competition in 2008.
- Bill writes for Quarterly Review of Wines magazine.
- Brian graduated in 1991, just when finance jobs were disappearing, but found a home in mutual funds for The Boston Co.
- They’re not alone in having striking extra-work interests.Both say Rockland’s advisor group is littered with entrepreneurial types who have notable hobbies.
