Managed Account Advisors

Managed Account Advisors

Managed Account Advisors (MAA) was formed in 2007 as a registered investment adviser subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation. The unit was designed to serve as the discretionary portfolio manager behind the bank's unified managed account programs, consolidating administrative functions for separately managed accounts distributed through Merrill Lynch and the Bank of America Private Bank. It does not raise external capital directly; rather, MAA operates as internal infrastructure for one of the largest wealth management franchises in the United States. MAA's core strategy is execution — constructing and rebalancing model portfolios across equity, fixed-income, and multi-asset mandates. The firm provides investment management for a range of strategies including tax-loss harvesting overlays, factor-based equity portfolios, and custom municipal bond ladders. Third-party sub-advisers supply the intellectual property for many strategies, while MAA handles implementation, trading, and ongoing overlay management. The footprint is domestic, concentrated on US-based taxable and tax-exempt investors. As a subsidiary embedded within Bank of America's broader asset management and wealth divisions, MAA's scale reflects the parent's distribution rather than standalone asset-gathering. Assets under management are consolidated and reported at the parent level, making a discrete AUM figure for MAA alone unavailable. Separate regulatory filings list MAA as managing discretely directed accounts, but those figures represent only a portion of the flows it supports. Staffing and professional headcount are not broken out publicly. MAA's architectural differentiator is its role as a mid-office manager rather than an investment-picking engine. By centralizing cash management, rebalancing, and overlay coordination for assets advised by numerous third-party managers, the firm removes operational friction that would otherwise fall to individual financial advisors. This allows the Private Bank to deliver a unified managed account experience — a structure more common at wirehouses than at smaller single-family offices, and a durable advantage for the parent company's full-service model.