Emily Dreas started her career doing business development for a 12-person asset manager in Florida. Two decades later, she oversees a team of 240 and is leading Bank of America’s private bank in one of its key markets: New York.
As senior executive for the private bank, Dreas’s team is made up of portfolio managers, trust officers, associates and 43 private client advisors. They have clients throughout the U.S. but operate out of Bank of America’s offices at One Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan.
The bank is busy strengthening its presence in what remains the biggest financial center in North America. Last month, it announced three new hires brought into its leadership ranks from rival firms.
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Mary Chan and Jeremy Sunshine were recruited from JPMorgan Private Bank, and Chris Petro from Citi Private Bank; all will be market executives under Dreas, who predicted there will be more announcements of this sort to come.
“Advisors are calling us on the back of all that, because these are three leaders that people want to follow,” Dreas said in a recent interview. “And so we have had tremendous interest, and we’ll be announcing some more hires that are going to be joining us.”
Dreas was promoted to her current position early this year after serving as a market executive for Bank of America’s private bank in southern Connecticut. She now reports to Geena Mayback, division executive for the private bank’s New York Tri-State market.
Dreas got her start in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, at the asset manager Intrepid Capital Management. The firm had only 12 employees and no one doing business development, which is what the then 22-year-old Dreas was hired to provide.
“So literally from the start of my career, I was client-facing, going to various conferences, both for high net worth clients, but also pensions and institutions,” she said. “They didn’t care where our clients came from, and so I really got an education early on.”
Dreas went on to positions working with high net worth and private bank clients at Citi in London and then later as a regional managing director for Wells Fargo’s private bank in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her move to Bank of America, following two years at Fiduciary Trust Company International, came in 2019.
At Bank of America Private Bank, Dreas is part of a wealth management unit with about $700 billion in client balances, a figure that includes assets under management as well as loans and deposits. Dreas said the private bank’s New York market has seen some impressive growth, with its client balances increasing by roughly 50% over the past five years and its client revenue by 30% in the past three.
Dreas recently sat down with Financial Planning to discuss Bank of America Private Bank’s opportunities in the New York market, the new trend of wealthy clients wanting to own sports teams and how the bank eases the transition for private bankers recruited from rival firms.
This article has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Financial Planning: Bank of America Private Bank has seen recent growth in its New York market. Where do you think that’s coming from?
Emily Dreas: I’d say that, particularly for our platform, we have really become a go-to on the credit side. And I have seen a significant amount of clients that we knew were going to renew lines towards the end of the year, wanting to increase those lines and move up the timeline.
A lot of that is on the back of capital markets being a little uneasy with the tariff conversation and liquidity events being moved out and wanting some dry powder now to continue to invest, which is always a great sign.
And then, in addition to that, I think people are getting used to rates where they are now. We’re not used to zero anymore. And so making those big home purchases and mortgages and all of that has really ramped up in the past year as well.
FP: How is a private bank, as opposed to a regular consumer bank, better positioned to meet some of those needs?
ED: I think what it really is that when the client really shows us what they have and what they’re trying to do, we can get really creative. Of course, we have our guidelines and our policies for liquidity and cash flow and all of that for a loan.
But tell me where the money is going. Tell me what you need, and let us figure out the best way to get there and structure it with various covenants that will protect us and protect them, but still be able to get them the liquidity that they need.
When I talk to our clients, clients that are with a lot of our competitors, they share that this is really where we shine.
FP: Are you typically using securities held in clients’ portfolios as collateral for loans?
ED: It’s even more sophisticated than that.
That’s kind of standard in private bank and private wealth lending. We’re lending against art, we’re lending against commercial real estate, multifamily. We’re doing a lot of unsecured [lending] for folks that have a lot of investments in private equity and are waiting for those disbursements.
FP: What do you generally find high net worth and ultrahigh net worth clients are looking for these days?
ED: One of the trends that we’ve been seeing, and even having a few events around, are passion assets.
So we had a fun event last year down in Palm Beach, and we were talking about art. That has become a passion investment.
And certainly we’ve seen it with autos, bourbon, the whole mix. One that I can say in the past five years is always at the top of the list is sports. And I wouldn’t have told you that 10 years ago.
Some clients want to look at buying teams, look at shares of teams. I know our due diligence group is now looking at funds that are buying pieces of sports teams.
And for us, we do the lending, too. When a client wants to buy a sports team, we’re there for them to talk through how to structure that deal and provide that liquidity to them. It’s been a fun shift that I haven’t seen before.
FP: The private bank is adding advisors. One thing we often hear is that it’s hard for advisors recruited from a large bank to bring over a large share of the assets they formerly had under management.
ED: It isn’t necessarily the ease of moving the assets that’s the issue, but, at least for us, that once a client is part of our client team, and they meet all the different specialists, they really feel bought into the expertise of everyone there.
So you’re hearing it’s harder because, at the end of the day, the client really feels that they’re part of the private bank. And certainly some of those folks do follow the relationship manager, the portfolio manager, the trust officer because of what they have done for them and their family; it’s just not the same as when they really have that one advisor that they might move from shop to shop with as on the brokerage side.
FP: Has Bank of America Private Bank done anything to lower some of those barriers to moving client assets over?
ED: I’d say really looking to make sure that the credit structures that new recruits would need for their client base is something we can do right.
All of us have different specialties, and so it’s really digging in and making sure that the type of structures that they’ve done before are something that we can do. And if it’s not, what could we do instead?
And it tends to be pretty seamless here, because our platform is so significant that when you think about the managers that someone might be using somewhere else, there’s a high likelihood that they’re here on our platform as well.
But I will always go through that with recruits and find out: Okay, what are the managers that you really enjoy using, and what are the credit facilities that you need? It’s to help them start to think about who their partners would be, so they can envision themselves here before they’re even walking in the door.
FP: What do you think attracts advisors to the private bank?
ED: Many of the folks coming, what they care about most is: Are my clients going to be happy at this institution?
They’ve been just so encouraged by our really open balance sheet. In addition to that, we have an incredible investment platform. We’re building that out with various alternatives that we provide for our clients. And then there’s your classic private banking.
And we have spent $13 billion a year on technology. We’ve created the most incredible tech platforms for our clients to make banking just seamless. You know, even with our onboarding, which any client will tell you that’s ever onboarded at a private bank, it can sometimes be extremely paper-intensive. I would love to call it a labor of love, but I think that’s a stretch.
With some of our new technologies around that, we’re reducing our account-opening times by 60%. Sometimes you can just say: We’re investing in technology, we’re investing in technology. But our folks and our clients really see it with our mobile apps and how they’re working with their teams. And I love that.
In the end, they’ve got this concierge private banking team that’s there for their every need, and they have all this incredible technology right there on their phone.
