Area veteran to spearhead bank's move to expand in state's Gulf Coast area. Bank of New York Mellon has opened a new wealth-management office in Tampa, Fla., and hired veteran private banker Ray Ifert to run it. BNY Mellon says the move expands its presence in the state's high-net-worth space, especially in the populous Tampa Bay area.

"Our Tampa location gives us room for expansion both within the community and on the entire Gulf Coast of Florida," says BNY Mellon wealth-management head Larry Hughes.

Ifert comes to BNY Mellon from Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions Bank, where he was in charge of sales for the company's Florida-based high net worth sales division. Before that, he was a senior vice president with the Private Bank of Bank of America where he was the market executive of the Tampa Bay market. Prior to that he was head of Bank of America's private-banking business in the northwestern U.S. -- and before that he was head of Charlotte, N.C.-based NationsBank's wealth-management business in Tampa. (In 1998, NationsBank acquired San Francisco-based BankAmerica and changed its name to Bank of America).

Count 'em

Reporting to Ifert at BNY Mellon are Matt Masem Jr., who retired from the Private Bank of Bank of America last year (and who reported to Ifert as head of NationsBank's private-banking representative in Clearwater, Fla.), Lea LeVines from U.S. Trust Bank of America Wealth Management in Tampa and Paul Anderson, also from U.S. Trust Bank of America Wealth Management, which has housed Bank of America's private-banking group since last summer.

Masem and LeVines are responsible for business development and ongoing client management for BNY Mellon's Tampa office; Anderson will manage client portfolios.

Ifert reports to Paul Dresselhaus, head of BNY Mellon's operations on the west coast of Florida.

Florida is known as a retirement and second-home destination for the wealthy. But as the fourth most populous state in the U.S., Florida is also a vibrant engine of new wealth creation. In 2006, it had more millionaire households (369,912) than any other state except California (663,394), according to Rhinebeck, N.Y.-based wealth-market research firm Phoenix Marketing International -- and California has twice the total population. Overall, Florida had six metropolitan areas with millionaire-to-general-population ratios that ranked in the top 25 such areas in the U.S. versus California's eight.

BNY Mellon has no shortage of on-the-ground competitors in Tampa. The five wirehouses aside, its rivals for high-net-worth wallet share in the area are -- to name a very few -- GenSpring Family Offices (formerly Asset Management Advisors), Lydian Bank & Trust, local broker-dealers INVEST and GunnAllen -- and of course Raymond James is headquartered in nearby St. Petersburg.

BNY Mellon says the new office is its twenty-first in Florida. According to its website though, the Tampa office makes 25 in the state, with most of them in and around Miami on the Atlantic-Ocean side. The nearest BNY Mellon private-client offices to Tampa are in Orlando and down the Gulf Coast in Naples. -FWR

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