Word: witters
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...prospective sale of such in-house information upsets some firms. Said Robert Stovall, director of investment policy for the Wall Street firm Dean Witter Reynolds, whose directory will probably be offered: "It's an invitation to subject our employees to unwanted solicitations. The book wasn't prepared for some parasite to grab it and sell it." Dean Witter considers its directory to be proprietary information, and may copyright it to protect it further. Bank of America already did that last year to stop CIS from selling the bank's phone book...
...card in that group is not American Express or Diners Club but the Sears card. One of the first customers of the financial center at the Sears store in Cupertino, Calif., in the heart of the Silicon Valley, was a man who opened a $ 1.9 million account at Dean Witter Reynolds, the stockbroker that Sears bought in 1981. At the other end of the scale, a third of American households earning less than $10,000 are Sears customers too. Sears studies show that 86% of its customers are married, 54% have children, 54% are white collar, 28% blue collar...
Telling's most distinctive innovation during his remodeling of Sears was to steer the company into the financial-services business. Within a single week in 1981, Sears moved to buy Dean Witter for $610 million and Coldwell Banker, a California real estate firm, for $202 million...
Wriston is right to worry. Telling says that a large number of Sears financial customers are "men and women who have been unwilling to venture into traditional securities brokerage and real estate offices, but who trust the integrity that Sears has established over time." About 60% of Dean Witter's new clients at the 234 Sears Financial Service centers are first-time brokerage accounts. Overall, these clients are younger, with slightly lower household income than Dean Witter's traditional customers. Says David Wells, 37, a Chicago engineer and experienced investor who has opened a brokerage account...
...Sears strategy for expansion into financial services is bold, and Sears is now aggressively going after this market. While it has let go a few analysts, Deari Witter nonetheless plans to add 1,200 account executives this year, at a time when other brokers are holding firm or cutting back. Merrill Lynch, for example, has laid off 1,000 people, and 1,500 more are scheduled to follow by year...