At the penultimate general session of Schwab Impact 2011, the current leadership of Schwab Advisor Services in the person of Jim McCool lauded the contributions to the RIA community of John Coghlan in an emotional session for many pioneers of that community.
It was Coghlan, said McCool in the preamble to the evening presentation in San Francisco by Joshua Cooper Ramo of Kissinger Associates, who in the 1980s recognized the value of the nascent RIAs to those advisors, to Schwab, to those advisors' families and to their end clients. McCool (below), executive VP of Schwab's Institutional Services unit, said Coghlan was the first executive at Schwab who saw the potential of the advisor business. In a video tribute, a number of advisor pioneers, including Dave Diesslin and Peggy Ruhlin, lauded Coghlan for his contributions while he worked at Schwab.
"He got it first," said Diesslin in the video, while Ruhlin said that Coghlan, who now serves on multiple boards and is a venture capitalist in San Francisco, "helped make our business what it is today."