The Merrill Lynch brand is not as strong as it used to be in Australia, why is this so?
Merrill Lynch has a much broader business in Australia than it is given credit for. The focus globally over the past few years has been on having profitable and sustainable businesses. Here in Australia, we have one of the most profitable retail businesses in absolute dollars and in revenue per head. Generally, though, we recognise the need to increase resources in our Australian business. We want to capitalise on some of the opportunities that exist in the market – opportunities that we haven’t been positioned to capture in the past. The reality is that most of Australia’s wealthiest people are our clients. We have a lot of strong relationships that we want to build on. Proof of the strength of these relationships is our annual Australian Investment Conference which happens in New York each year. Next week we will be taking 23 companies over to the US to meet with institutional investors. We’ve been doing this for two decades.

So what is the crux of your strategy?
Merrill Lynch is all about providing solutions for our clients. Our natural market share in Australia is about half of what it should be and we can increase this significantly just by better leveraging the full capabilities of our existing platform across our client base. We’ve had success doing this in Asia, particularly on the private client side, and this is a model we hope to replicate in Australia.

What products are at the heart of your strategy?
We can see opportunities for structured products, across the credit and equity, asset and liability and wholesale and retail spaces. We can do more in this arena. We want to extend the platform, by targeting both our institutional investor base and our retail clients. Insurers are increasingly asking for structured liability products, while corporates that have large sums of cash, are seeking higher returns from their surpluses. An example of this is on the financing side, where over the past 12 months we have introduced a newly integrated global markets financing and services business, which comprises a range of activities such as prime brokerage, stock loan, equity margin lending and third party clearing.