Wilmington Trust Corporation's (WL) advisory business will become a Wilmington Trust-branded unit of M&T Bank (MTB) through M&T's planned takeover of the Wilmington, Del.-based trust company.

Under M&T, Wilmington Trust's Wealth Advisory Services and Corporate Client Services businesses "will continue to operate under the Wilmington Trust brand, with expanded access to M&T's clients and markets," Donald Foley, Wilmington Trust's chairman and chief executive officer, said Monday on a conference call hosted by M&T and Wilmington Trust.

Because the Wilmington Trust brand is better known than comparable-size rivals due to its retail presence in Delaware, it may be able to win business from clients who are wary of crisis-soiled Wall Street firms but nervous about low-profile boutiques, according to Steve Marks of the Boston-based consulting firm SRM Associates.

"In an era when so many of the dominant financial-service brands have grown tarnished, it will be interesting to see if a smaller brand name with more clout behind it can position itself to say [it's] big enough on the service side but more intimate with and focused on individual clients," said Marks.

M&T's chairman and chief executive Robert Wilmers seems to agree.

It makes sense to keep the Wilmington Trust branding for its trust, investment and corporate-client services because they are a match for anything on offer from the largest financial institutions, Wilmers said Monday on the conference call.

In particular, Buffalo, N.Y.-based M&T expects to benefit from cross sales of Wilmington Trust's advisory services to M&T's business-banking clients in Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and upstate New York, he added.

Word of the merger, which is expected to be completed by mid 2011, coincided with the release of Wilmington, Del.-based Wilmington Trust's third-quarter numbers. The trust company reported a loss, its sixth in a row, of $4.06 a share as a result of its exposure to bad construction loans in the mid-Atlantic region.

Income from Wilmington Trust's advisory businesses was $92.5 million in its most recent third quarter, down 2% from the third quarter of 2009. Wilmington Trust's advisory businesses are Wealth Advisory Services, Corporate Client Services and affiliated asset managers Cramer Rosenthal McGlynn and Roxbury Capital Management.

The company says the 4% year-over-year slide in third-quarter income for its Wealth Advisory Services group was due to clients moving to lower-fee investment products such as fixed-income and index funds, and because of a reduced stake in multifamily office Grant Tani Barash & Altman.

Wilmington Trust's commercial-banking division, which accounts for the bulk of its business, will become M&T-branded branches with a view to making M&T the dominate retail bank in Delaware, as it already is in Maryland.

-By Thomas Coyle, Dow Jones Newswires; 207-631-4235; thomas.coyle@dowjones.com
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