Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch Wealth Management unit is banning trainee brokers from making cold calls, a vestige of an era when the industry pushed hot stocks on anyone who would pick up the phone.

Merrill plans to roll out a revamped adviser-training programme on 24 May that prohibits participants from cold calling, people familiar with the matter said. The bank will instead direct them to use internal referrals or LinkedIn messages to land clients, they said. The decision comes after the programme’s 3,000 trainees were told to stop outbound recruiting efforts to find new customers last year after problematic phone calls.