Wilmington Trust, a 98-year-old Delaware-based investment firm with $26.1 billion in assets under management, will open an office in Costa Mesa in July.
The firm wants to take advantage of the growing number of millionaires in Southern California, said Alan Bonde, president of Wilmington Trust’s California operations.
“It was a simple decision to recommend to senior management that the next office in California should be in Orange County. It’s a marketplace that deserves our attention,” Bonde said.
The company already has an office in Santa Monica.
The Orange County office will be headed by Nella Webster, formerly a business development officer with the Orange County operations of U.S. Trust. She has five employees so far, working out of the Santa Monica office, but once the tenant improvements in the new office are completed, Webster expects her ranks to grow.
“I am trying to find people that I competed with before and I consider premier (professionals),” Webster said. The asset management business has grown significantly in the past decade, with the baby boom generation hitting its peak along with the large amounts of money being made in technology and the Internet recently.
“The amount of wealth in California and the Western part of the country is very appealing,” said Bonde.
And Webster is hopeful about bringing that money under Wilmington Trust’s wing.
“I think we we’ll blow through the numbers we are projecting to do,” Webster said.
The Wilmington, Del.-based company has been on a drive to expand its presence in some of the wealth markets across the nation.
“The top wealth markets are where we plan to have offices,” Bonde said.
To help it get there, the company recently acquired two fund managers.
In 1998 it acquired a majority interest in Cramer, Rosenthal McGlynn LLC, a value money manager. And last year it bought a minority interest in Roxbury Capital Management, a growth manager.
“We are able to offer a blend of investment styles that reduces the volatility and increase the returns,” Bonde said.
The company has clients in all 50 states, but it only has offices in six other U.S. states. It also has offices in London, the Cayman Islands and the Channel Islands.
It also is planning to open a few more offices in California, including one in the Silicon Valley. The company opened the Santa Monica office three years ago when it bought Santa Monica-based Roxbury.
Bonde said that it has a minimum account size of $1 million and nationwide the average account size is $3 million. But it is different in California.
“California is higher than that, almost twice that,” Bonde said. n
