Raymond James has topped off a year of major technology investment and upgrades with the promotion of Vin Campagnoli to the position of chief information officer.
In the past 12 to 18 months, the firm spent more than $200 million on development of its technology platforms to accelerate the deployment of a new platform for Raymond James advisors and to integrate legacy Morgan Keegan systems. Campagnoli, who was involved extensively on those projects as senior vice president and head of Private Client Group Technology Strategy and Development, is hoping to continue that momentum in his new post.
“In a way, it’s a very smooth transition,” Campagnoli said in a phone interview. “A lot of [executives] in the past 12 to 18 months... have been extremely supporting of partnering with me to make sure the business direction I was going with technology was being heard and executed on.”
Prior to joining Raymond James in 2011, Campagnoli was a senior technology leader for UBS Wealth Management Americas where he specialized in advisor and client technology. When he arrived, he began “looking for differentiating technology that advisors can’t find anywhere else and want to stay here for,” he said.
As part of accomplishing that mission, he formed an advisory group of handpicked financial advisors who had joined Raymond James’ traditional employee broker dealer branch as well as its independent channels over the past two years. He interviewed them to understand what they liked about moving to Raymond James’ platform as well as what they missed about their previous systems.
“[We] come up with nice ideas, a mixture of outside knowledge coming in from other firms in addition to what people liked about the internal system,” Campagnoli said.
In the instance of the Morgan Keegan technology integration, that helped the firm to integrate some key aspects of the Morgan Keegan platform into the Raymond James desktop in time for the system-wide conversion in February.
“Some of those things we didn’t do on the conversion weekend,” he explained. “We were getting those things done two to three months before.”
Campagnoli replaces outgoing chief information officer, Tim Eitel, will stay on in an advisory capacity.
