The reshaping of CIBC’s wealth-management business is well underway, with two recent appointments at the most senior level of the division.

Virginia Macdonald has been given the top job at the funds division, having been named vice president of mutual funds and managed solutions. Macdonald has been with the bank since 1990, most recently as vice president of managed investment products at CIBC Asset Management.

The other person promoted is Tom Williams, to executive director of retail products, distribution, for CIBC Asset Management. In his early 30s, Williams has risen quickly from a position as a CIBC Wood Gundy branch manager to head of national sales at the fund arm.

The shakeup began in late summer with the sudden departure of Brenda Bartlett, then president of CIBC Asset Management, who had been in the job for a matter of months.

Prior to that, she was president of CM Investment Management, a division of CIBC that was acquired with CIBC acquired the Canadian retail assets of Merrill Lynch Canada Inc. CM no longer exists.

Macdonald was quietly named to the job on Nov. 3, with no formal announcement from CIBC.

The architect of the changes, Victor Dodig, has a reputation as a talented strategic thinker. He was hired as executive vice president of CIBC Wealth Management in April and charged with the integration of the many investment products CIBC offers through its divisions: CIBC Wood Gundy Private Client, Online Brokerage, TAL Global Asset Management and CIBC’s Asset Management businesses.

“What’s lacking in CIBC is congruence in all its distribution channels,” says a senior industry source who has direct knowledge of CIBC. “Victor Dodig has mapped out what he wants to do.”

Before moving to CIBC, Dodig was CEO of UBS Global Asset Management (Canada) .
He attended Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, at which he was a Baker Scholar. Neither Mr. Dodig nor his senior staff would be interviewed.

Retail banking has become even more important since CIBC retreated, licking its wounds, from its disastrous forays into the U.S. The expansion of wealth management and retail banking are like a specialized ecosystem, dependent on each other for growth.

In addition to changes in his senior staff, Dodig is paring down a jumble of subadvisors that are paid to manage products for the bank’s many divisions. In the past, the various product silos — retail banking, private banking for wealthy clients, CIBC Wood Gundy and the Talvest group of funds — each had their own laundry list of advisors managing mutual funds, wrap accounts and other products. The result was a huge number of subadvisors — all collecting fees.

Numerous changes to product management have been made since August, with, for example, McLean Budden Ltd. and KBSH Capital Management Inc. out and UBS and Front Street Investment Management picking up business.

TAL Global Asset Management Inc. , a subsidiary of CIBC, has also been assigned management of more products in recent weeks.

The strategy is to streamline and get better purchasing power. If CIBC gets scale with its product managers, it can reduce costs.

Maintaining competitively priced products is essential, according to Andrew Carver, an analyst with Morningstar Canada. “The biggest risk facing CIBC is that retail banking clients will eschew the firm’s products and services,” he explains in a recent report. “By placing more of its eggs into the retail banking basket, CIBC becomes more highly leveraged to Canadian consumers and the macroeconomic events that affect them.”

Although performance of many of the CIBC funds is solid, the performance of the Talvest funds in recent years has been lacking, with a couple of exceptions. Talvest Millennium Next Generation and Talvest Global Health Care are two that have performed well.

CIBC is also working to improve its wrap programs, which are marketed to more affluent clients. IE