Jim Cracchiolo and the 111-Year-Old New Company

At the New York Stock Exchange on October 3, 2005, Jim Cracchiolo had an unusual introduction to make. The company beginning its independent trading life was already 111 years old. It had a history, a workforce and clients with money to worry about. What it needed was a name people would learn to trust. Ameriprise Financial was stepping out from American Express, and Cracchiolo was responsible for what happened next.

A stock-exchange bell offers a pleasingly definite sound for a rather indefinite undertaking. You can hear when independence begins. You have to wait to discover what it means. For Cracchiolo, then the new company’s chairman and chief executive, that distinction would occupy rather more time than the ceremony.

Twenty years later, Ameriprise returned to the exchange to mark the anniversary. Cracchiolo was still in charge. Between those two visits lay a financial crisis, acquisitions and the less photogenic business of making an organization work.

A company with two birthdays

The separation had become legally effective on September 30, 2005. American Express shareholders received one Ameriprise share for every five American Express shares they held. The distribution put an existing business into new hands: largely the same shareholders, now owning two companies separately.

That arrangement helps explain the particular nature of Cracchiolo’s assignment. He was taking responsibility for an operating business with inherited obligations. There were clients to retain, employees to organize and a public company to equip. A new logo would occupy only a small corner of the job.

The logic of the separation was straightforward. American Express could concentrate on card payments and network processing. Ameriprise could set its own investment priorities without competing with the other businesses inside its former parent. Freedom, in this instance, meant deciding where the money went - and being answerable for the decision.

The accountant who kept changing desks

Cracchiolo grew up in Brooklyn. His father produced technical drawings for the Air Force; his oldest brother was an engineer. He initially pursued a combined engineering and business program involving NYU and Cooper Union, before turning toward business. Looking back, he explained the attraction simply: “I wanted to actually figure out how everything worked.”

His eventual qualifications were in accounting, economics and finance. NYU awarded his bachelor’s degree in 1980 and his MBA in 1985. He attended the graduate program at night. The arrangement placed formal study alongside the demands of earning a living, an early overlap between understanding an enterprise and working inside one.

He worked in public accounting at Ernst & Whinney before joining American Express in 1982. His first American Express assignment was as comptroller of a direct-merchandising business. As the operation expanded and consolidated, his responsibilities widened into its back office. Finance led him toward the machinery behind the figures.

That early movement is a useful clue to his later career. Accounting asks whether the numbers describe a business properly. Operations asks how the business produces them. Cracchiolo’s assignments repeatedly crossed that boundary. By 1990 he was chief financial officer of Shearson Lehman Brothers, then part of American Express. Later came strategy, reengineering, network services and international leadership.

Independence in the small print

He became president of Global Network Services in 1997 and president and CEO of Travel Related Services International in 1998. In 2000 he took charge of American Express Financial Advisors, alongside broader financial-services responsibilities. By the time separation arrived, he had already spent five years leading the predecessor business.

That experience mattered because the practical requirements arrived together. Ameriprise needed its own brand, technology and public-company functions while continuing to serve clients. The timetable allowed little room for treating those tasks as a leisurely sequence. A business cannot ask its existing customers to return once the corporate stationery has settled down.

The first earnings announcement after the split captures the double workload. Ameriprise reported that it had introduced its new corporate name, established the RiverSource product brand and launched an advertising campaign. It also reported ordinary operating measures: clients, financial plans, advisor productivity and retention. The separation and the daily business shared the same reporting period.

The figures also complicated any easy celebration. In that first post-separation release, third-quarter net income before discontinued operations fell 35 percent from a year earlier, while adjusted earnings rose 11 percent. The two measures treated separation costs and other items differently. A launch could therefore contain both operating progress and a decline in a reported earnings measure. For shareholders, understanding the new company required reading past its new name and into the accounting.

This is where Cracchiolo’s earlier roles become more than a collection of promotions. A comptroller, an operations manager and an international executive each sees different ways a plan can come unstuck. The independent company required all those perspectives at once.

The crisis enters the room

The new company had scarcely had time to become familiar when the financial system began coming apart. During the crisis, Ameriprise advanced about $700 million of its own cash to clients whose money was frozen in Reserve funds. The company subsequently recovered that money. It also came through the period without taking TARP capital.

Cash is an unromantic form of reassurance until someone needs it. The episode gave a concrete meaning to a financial company’s promise of a continuing relationship. Clients had immediate obligations; their trapped investments were operating on a different timetable. Ameriprise used its balance sheet to bridge the gap.

The business still felt the downturn. Its first-quarter 2009 results described lower asset-based fees, pressure from interest rates and expense reductions. Cracchiolo was managing a company exposed to the same economic forces troubling its clients. Having resources to act did not exempt it from the consequences of falling markets.

That distinction belongs in the account of his tenure. Financial resilience has to coexist with losses, difficult decisions and limits. A company’s preparations matter precisely because it cannot choose the conditions in which they will be tested.

Buying the next chapter

Ameriprise also continued buying businesses. In November 2008 it completed the acquisition of H&R Block Financial Advisors. More than 950 advisors worked across 135 offices. The transaction was expected to bring approximately 365,000 client accounts. Integration would involve people and relationships, along with the assets recorded on a closing statement.

In April 2010 came the approximately $1 billion cash purchase of Columbia Management’s long-term asset-management business from Bank of America. The acquisition brought additional investment capabilities and a distribution agreement with access to Bank of America-affiliated channels. Ameriprise combined Columbia with its existing U.S. investment business.

There is a practical connection between those deals. Advisors need investments to offer clients. Investment managers need distribution and investors. Cracchiolo was building both sides of that arrangement, with the coordination and potential complications that come from running several related businesses.

The international Threadneedle operation supplied another part of the picture. In 2015, Columbia and Threadneedle adopted the shared Columbia Threadneedle Investments brand. At launch, their combined operations had more than 2,000 people across 18 countries. The shared identity arrived years after the Columbia purchase, a reminder that a transaction’s closing date and a business’s development follow different calendars.

“We’re all driven to achieve”

Jim Cracchiolo, reflecting on leadership and values in 2016

The bell rings again

On October 9, 2025, Ameriprise marked twenty years of independence with a closing-bell celebration. It also announced a $100,000 grant to Feeding America. The event joined a corporate anniversary to a community commitment rather than leaving the occasion entirely to the exchange’s photographers.

For Cracchiolo, the anniversary supplied an unusually long view of a decision he had helped execute. Many executives inherit an established public identity. He had been responsible for helping create this one, then stayed to manage the business beneath it.

Longevity brings its own questions about accountability. Ameriprise’s 2026 proxy continued to place the chairman and CEO responsibilities with Cracchiolo. The board explained its support for that structure in terms of his experience and knowledge of the company. Those combined titles keep both leadership and oversight arrangements part of his public story.

New tools, familiar questions

The work now includes artificial intelligence. In its second-quarter 2026 results, Ameriprise described bringing AI capabilities into advisor workflows while keeping human engagement central to advice. Technology is once again part of the operating system Cracchiolo is helping to build.

The same release reported $1.8 trillion in assets under management, administration and advisement. That is a measure of the firm’s activities, encompassing several categories of assets. It should be read with those categories attached. The figure describes the scale of responsibility; it says little on its own about any individual client’s experience.

The quarter also brought $6.5 billion in asset-management net outflows. Growing assets and withdrawals can appear in the same results because market movements and client decisions both affect the total. Even at this scale, the job includes persuading investors to stay and attracting the next commitment.

His stated priorities continue to include advice, wealth-management capabilities and investment in technology. The test for those investments is practical: whether they support the people doing the advising and the clients making decisions. New software enters an old relationship, with all the expectations already attached to it.

Cracchiolo’s career began with learning how businesses worked from the inside. It eventually placed him in charge of one that needed to introduce itself all over again. The name on the exchange has become familiar. Behind it, the work of maintaining systems, allocating capital and earning another conversation with a client continues. The bell, after all, only gets everyone’s attention.