‘SALOMON SISTERS’ IS COMING TO WALL STREET

A rarity, bank is both owned and managed by women and minorities

Wall Street is about to get a new investment bank, one that very deliberately shatters the glass ceiling.

The firm, Independence Point Advisors, will be a rarity that’s both owned and managed by women and minorities in an industry long dominated by White men. A wry joke early on that it should be called Salomon Sisters — a twist on the testosterone-fueled Salomon Brothers of old — has served as something of a code name for the venture among New York’s tight-knit crowd of bankers and financial headhunters.

Independence Point is the brainchild of Anne Clarke Wolff, who most recently was chairman of Bank of America’s massive corporate and investment bank division. A Salomon alum herself and mainstay on American Banker’s “Most Powerful Women to Watch” list, Wolff, 56, previously held leadership posts at Jpmorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup, working for Jamie Dimon and Michael Corbat.

Her firm could be a magnet. Across Wall Street, many women and members of minority groups are frustrated after decades in which investment banks diversified their senior ranks at a glacial pace.

Wolff left Bank of America in December with a goal of helping more women in banking balance the challenges of raising a family while working 100-hour weeks and rise unimpeded to the top of the industry. Since hatching the idea for Independence Point in the early spring, she’s been cultivating interest in the endeavor, drawing up a business plan and recruiting rainmakers.

For a time, after rising to chief executive officer of family-founded Lebenthal Holdings, Alexandra Lebenthal stood out as the rare woman running a Wall Street investment bank. She’s now a senior adviser at Houlihan Lokey. Sallie Krawcheck, who like Wolff held senior jobs at Citigroup and Bank of America, took a different route, founding a wealth-management firm for women, Ellevest.

Wolff started at Salomon Brothers in 1989, before its acquisition and transformation into Citigroup. She left in 2009 to join Jpmorgan and from 2011 to 2020 worked at Bank of America.

Like other investment banks, Independence Point will arrange capital-markets transactions and mergers. But Wolff also intends to fill gaps in the services that Wall Street firms typically offer clients, according to the people familiar with her plans. That includes advising on governance, risk management and hiring and retention — roles that could put the firm at the center of a professional network of women on boards or running their own companies.

Independencepoint.com has been registered as a web domain. So has salomonsisters.com.