Consulting Services Group brings in WM unit chief

FWR Staff

6 May 2009

Institutional investment consultant out to provide holistic wealth services. Former PricewaterhouseCoopers managing partner Vincent Robinson has joined Memphis, Tenn.-based Consulting Services Group as a managing partner to run the firm's new private-client group.

Robinson replaces CSG co-founder Lee Giovannetti, who founded the group and led it on an interim basis while conducting a search for a permanent point person.

The whole situation

CSG hopes to carve a significant wealth-management practice out of its 20-year-old institutional investment-consulting business. At the end of September 2008, CSG and its brokerage Trading Services Group had about $24 billion in assets under management for about 100 institutional clients -- pension funds and endowments for the most part -- with a smattering of private clients accounting for about $1 billion of that.

"We want to move this to focus not only on investment, but review the whole situation of the family and everything important to ; not just money and finance," Robinson told the Memphis Business Journal last week.

CSG and Robinson go back a long way. In the firm's first year of existence, co-founder Fred Hodges brought him in from PricewaterhouseCoopers predecessor firm Coopers & Lybrand to help identify and hire talented staffers for the firm -- including