Merrill Launches Retirement Services For Older Wealth

February 12, 2010 | By Kim Walker

With the retirement market set to explode as baby boomers increasingly leave the job market, it offers great opportunities for banks and financial institutions to tap into the most lucrative demographic in history. To that end Merrill Lynch in the USA is launching a new ad campaign called “help2retire,” setting aside between $15 and $20 million over the next four months to get it going.
“Help2retire” will be seen on billboards across the US as well as on television and in print media. The campaign will start with print media, with television ads to follow soon after.
Research from the company shows about $330 billion in retirement assets alone are set to rollover in 2010, making it a very lucrative market to service and manage. Over 13 million households in the United States qualify to convert their Roth IRA this year.
A sign will be set in Times Square which will prompt people to use their cell phones to text message them about wanting “help2retire,” which will then be seen up on the billboard.

Take a look at the weblink here: http://www.totalmerrill.com/TotalMerrill/pages/PreparingforRetirement.aspx.

I’m impressed that Merrill has clearly done it’s homework and identified some key ‘issues’ in the consumers mind in the panel “What matters to you” (see box).

According to their Press release: “With all the negative publicity surrounding other sectors of the industry, this is a good one to focus on, and the money is staggering that is potentially available to be serviced by those in the industry. This could really help the growth of Bank of America during the year, which will otherwise offer little opportunity in other financial areas“.

Absolutely!