Thomas Chrystie, the executive at Merrill Lynch & Co who was responsible for developing the Cash Management Account which spurred the growth of the company to a full-service financial provider, has passed away, Bloomberg reported. The report quoted Chrystie's daughter Helen C. Hipp as saying that her father died in a care facility in Charleston, South Carolina on December 24 after battling Alzheimer's disease for a number of years.
Chrystie aided Merrill Lynch Chairman Donald Regan in the 1970s in thinking of an innovation that would expand the work of its brokers, Bloomberg reported. Since the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 prohibited Merrill Lynch from offering its clients traditional checking and savings accounts, the company introduced the Cash Management Account in 1977. In this account, clients would be able to stow income from dividend and interest and earn money market interest rates that are higher than what other lenders offered. The funds could be accessed by a client's Visa card or check. Other Wall Street firms soon followed Chrystie's brainchild.
The creation of the account gave Merrill Lynch a new source of management fees as well as a tool to get customers from its rivals. Chrystie traveled from New York to California's Stanford Research Institute as the firm's Chief Financial Officer so he could come up with ideas for fresh business ventures. It was from that work that the idea of the CMA account was formed, the report said.
Commercial lenders at that time saw the CMA as an infringement on their turf and filed a case in court. However, Chrystie's foresight in getting a trademark and patent for the product became a cause for headaches to the company's rivals. It took only a year for the CMA to become a raging success, the report said.
Winthrop Smith Jr, a former executive vice president at Merrill Lynch whose father also led the company back in the 1950s told Bloomberg in an interview, "Tom was really one of the great innovative leaders at Merrill."
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