Citi has named Deborah Doyle McWhinney as head of its personal wealth management unit, which includes its 600-strong team of bank-based financial advisors who are not part of Citi’s joint venture with Morgan Stanley, which is slated to combine forces with Citi’s Smith Barney unit. McWhinney takes over May 1.

Craig Pfeiffer, the executive vice president at Smith Barney who formerly headed up Citi’s retail investment program, will move with the broker-dealer as part of the Morgan Stanley joint venture, but he leaves behind Citi’s Myfi platform, which was developed to serve the traditionally underserved emerging affluent market via a combination of online tools and call center help.

Alois Pirker, senior analyst at the Aite Group in Boston, heralded McWhinney’s appointment as an opportunity to capitalize on her background in both online brokerage and retail financial services by creating a “relationship-pricing” model. McWhinney, a 17-year veteran of Bank of America, also served as executive vice president of Visa International and as president of Charles Schwab Institutional.

Bank brokerage has long struggled with meaningful cross-sell, but if McWhinney is able to create a system where “client interests consolidate assets and the whole referral process is client oriented” rather than relying on the sharp eye of tellers to spot referral opportunities, the result “could be a very interesting proposition,” Pirker says. Pirker points to HSBC’s success in leveraging clients’ total relationships with the bank to combine traditional banking services with financial planning for the level of client wealth management tends to ignore. The result is revenue of $2,000 per client per year. “When you’ve got two million clients, that’s quite a business,” he says. The appointment of McWhinney, who will report to Citi Consumer Banking CEO Terri Dial, shows that Citi has every indication of following suit, Pirker says.