On Twitter, Krawcheck Finds a Voice

By William Alden
Sallie L. KrawcheckLucas Jackson/Reuters Sallie L. Krawcheck

Sallie L. Krawcheck may no longer work on Wall Street, but she is still in the finance fray — in 140 characters or less.

Ms. Krawcheck, who led Bank of America’s wealth management division until a management reshuffling in September, has been posting from a personal Twitter account and has amassed more than 2,000 followers in recent weeks.

She says this foray into social media is part of a larger effort to style herself as an industry analyst, a familiar role for the woman who once led the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

“I believe that my experiences can be of use to people,” said Ms. Krawcheck, who also was a chief financial officer of Citigroup. “If I can help investors, if I can help inform regulators, if I can help inform the industry — we’ll see which way it goes.”

Ms. Krawcheck, whose next steps have been a subject of speculation, would not comment on any possible plans, saying only that she wants to lend her Wall Street experience to the broader debate about the industry’s evolution.

“I’ve been spending a good bit of time with smaller businesses and with entrepreneurs in the financial services sector, trying to think through, and help them think through, what the next chapter is,” she said.

This mission has taken various forms. On Wednesday, Ms. Krawcheck was named to the advisory board of Gold Bullion International, a platform for investors to manage their gold holdings. In a Twitter message, she clarified that the move was “not a market call on gold, but on the power of asset diversification.”

In an opinion piece that appeared in Politico on Wednesday evening, Ms. Krawcheck makes a case for a robust Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has been attacked by the financial industry and by Republicans in Congress. In February, she argued in The Wall Street Journal for additional oversight of money-market funds.

It’s unusual for such a prominent Wall Street figure to be active on Twitter. The big firms generally bar their employees from using social media, and although some companies, like Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, have allowed some financial advisers onto Twitter and LinkedIn, those employees are kept on a tight leash.

But Ms. Krawcheck, whose use of Twitter was praised recently by the Web site Business Insider, appears to have embraced the form, issuing several messages a day and peppering them with a wry sense of humor.

One recent Twitter message referred to her former high-ranking role at Merrill Lynch, part of Bank of America:

In another series of postings, she listed the various ways that a writer for Marie Claire described her departure from Bank of America: “taking the fall” and “latest blow” were just two.

Ms. Krawcheck pointed to two Twitter users as particularly insightful. She said she regularly checks the account of Daniel Alpert, managing partner of the investment bank Westwood Capital, and she looks to Ian Bremmer, the political scientist, for commentary on geopolitical risk.

But she emphasized that she was still developing her Twitter routine.

“I don’t even know how to direct-message,” Ms. Krawcheck said with a laugh. “I’m brand new.”