Wall Street firm targets seventh city on its own list of top wealth centers. Merrill Lynch has opened a private-banking office in Boston to provide investment and credit services to private clients with at least $10 million in investable assets. Headed by Doug Revere, New England regional director for Merrill's private banking and investment group, the office has a staff of 32, and already accounts for about $7 billion in client assets.

Familiar names

"The market opportunity is wonderful here," says Revere. "Boston is very important to this organization."

Merrill's private-banking office is the latest in a spurt of wealth-management activity in the New England metropolis. Boston ranks seventh on Merrill's annual list of American "millionaire" cities, with over 4,400 households worth at least $10 million.

Though Boston has a long list of boutique wealth-management practices -- some of them generations old, others comparative upstarts -- including an unusual number of law firms, it is also headquarters to the wealth-management divisions of several national firms including Pittsburgh-based Mellon Financial, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America and homegrown Boston Private Financial.

Big-name out-of-towners with offices in Boston include JPMorgan Private Bank, Northern Trust and the Bank of New York (which is slated to merge with Mellon). SEI seems to have failed in an attempt to establish a multifamily office there.

Merrill Lynch has eight brokerage offices in the Boston area, catering, for the most part, to mass-affluent clients and lower-tier millionaires. -FWR

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