Goldman Sachs' Ayco unit is a big area of growth for the Wall Street powerhouse. Here's how it's upgrading early-career training for financial advisors.

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• Ayco, part of Goldman Sachs's wealth-management division, is upgrading its advisor training.
• The unit has started hiring early-career employees in classes, Ayco's CEO told Insider.
• Wealth managers have poured more resources into training early-career advisors in recent years.

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Goldman Sachs is known as an investment banking powerhouse that advises companies, ultra-wealthy people, and big investors. But inside its wealth management arm the bank has a lesser-known unit, headquartered in Albany, New York, 150 miles north of Manhattan's financial district, called Ayco.

The business, which Goldman acquired in 2003, specializes in providing financial planning and wealth-management services for employees of other organizations — like Google parent company Alphabet, Chipotle, Toyota, and Phillips 66 — from the C-suite to the rank-and-file.

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It has grown in recent years. Goldman Chief Executive David Solomon told analysts last week that expanding Ayco is part of the bank's long-term plan it has devised to serve Main Street customers, too. The bank said during its 2020 investor day that it set out to add 30 new corporate Ayco clients and 300,000 employees as clients annually — and to grow the unit's teams — as part of that goal.

As Ayco caters to a growing swath of employees and finds itself in the middle of Wall Street's most competitive hiring market in recent memory, the business is also looking to improve the way it trains its early-career advisors by starting to hire in formal classes throughout the year and introducing new training.

"This is a huge focus of ours," said Larry Restieri, Ayco's chief executive and the co-head of the Personal Financial Management Group, the unit that houses Ayco and Personal Financial Management, in an interview with Insider.

"I expect us to be leaning heavily into this, certainly as we get into the next year or two," said Restieri, a partner at Goldman who joined the firm in 2000. The business plans to be "really outspoken on what we're doing in terms of training our advisors and getting people prepared," providing employees ongoing training, he said.

Changes to hiring, training

It's going about that in several ways. Ayco has three training programs: one for advisors working with clients who have basic financial plans (where preparing financial "coaches," or entry-level advisors, takes eight months) and one for clients who are starting to have more complex questions about their finances as they build up wealth.

The third is for corporate executives with sophisticated needs like handling stock compensation plans, where it takes between three to five years before a new advisor is ready to work with clients. For this program, Ayco is working to get new hires onto an advisor team early in the process so that they can receive more hands-on training.

The firm is also building a training program aimed at getting early-career professionals, like people who have recently graduated from undergraduate programs and business schools, prepared to work with clients who have basic financial planning needs in as little as about a year.

Coaches deal with more straightforward financial questions from clients who have basic needs, and can become an advisor who takes on bigger clients or take other paths as they advance.

Ayco has also started hiring early-career advisors in more formalized classes that start in January, May, July, and October, similar to how firms have designated intern and analyst cohorts.

Ayco has some 300 financial advisors, another 130 or so coaches, and other client-facing employees who assist advisors in their work with clients. PFM has around 250 advisors, and the PFMG has 2,500 employees overall. A spokesperson declined to specify the number of early-career advisors Ayco has hired this year.

A spokesperson declined to comment on whether the business has increased starting salaries for early-career employees, which Goldman and its competitors did for junior bankers and other staffers this year.

Restieri touted one aspect of the business that reflects the industry's direction: moving away from old-school cold-calling and relying on referrals and advisor team models to drum up new business.

Merrill Lynch Wealth Management banned advisor trainees from cold-calling this year, and Morgan Stanley's advisors are increasingly part of teams rather than working solo.

"We don't need people to go cold-call and track down the clients. We literally can start to hand them clients that we think are a good match for them, and they can grow their careers," Restieri said, referring to Ayco's existing relationships with corporate clients.