Fund co.'s RIA Group adds one sales executive, nine relationship managers. Boston-based Fidelity RIA Group (FRIAG) has hired nine relationship managers and a senior v.p. for sales in a bid to strengthen its position as a custodian and service agency for independent investment advisors.

FRIAG is the biggest RIA custody provider after San Francisco-based Schwab Institutional.

The new sales executive is Jylanne Dunne, formerly executive v.p. for business development at Roseland, N.J.-based investment-management outsourcer Bisys (which is set to be acquired by Citigroup).

New assets

"Jylanne is a significant addition to our sales team, and we are looking forward to her helping us continue to build upon the tremendous sales momentum we have achieved over the past few years," says Jim Dario, head of relationship management at Fidelity's RIA custody group.

The "momentum" Dario mentions is the $60 billion in new custody assets FRIAG saw in the 15 months through 31 March 2007. Altogether FRIAG custodied about $260 billion for around 3,700 RIA, bank-trust and third-party retirement-plan administrators at the end of this year's first quarter.

Schwab Institutional was custodian to $524.5 billion in client assets for approximately 5,000 RIAs on 31 March 2007.

FRIAG's other recent hires are wealth-manager specialists

Patrick Richardson, for Fidelity's mid-Atlantic region
Allen Rea and James Olmore, Southern California and the Southwest
Relura Horton and Angelo Aloisio, Northern California and the Pacific Northwest
Scott Lawton, south-central states
Hazel Durand, Eastern region

And practice-area specialists Ruth Mulligan (investment-manager RIAs in New York and New Jersey) and David Herlihy (bank-trust clients).

"These appointments demonstrate our commitment to building a skilled team of professionals who understand the unique needs of our clients and can deliver the business-planning and practice-management support they need to drive scale and efficiency, keep them at the forefront of the industry and better serve their clients," says Dario. "We recognize that business growth is the number-priority for many advisors and they are looking to their custodian to deliver business planning support to help them manage this growth."

The latest spate of hires brings FRIAG's sales and relationship-management team to 125 or so -- a 25% increase since the end of 2005, according to Fidelity. -FWR

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