Helping women get ahead in financial services

We have a responsibility to help strengthen our community wherever we can, and help it prepare to thrive in the years ahead.

While the Financial Services Institute will always be laser-focused on our mission of advocacy on behalf of our members, we have also come to play another very important role: that of a think tank for the independent financial services community. As part of that crucial role, we realize we have a responsibility to help strengthen our community wherever we can, and help it prepare to thrive in the years ahead.

One way we are working to accomplish this goal is to provide opportunities for experienced female executives and financial advisers to come together to address the persistent challenge of helping other women get started — and get ahead — in the independent financial services world.

At our recent OneVoice conference in San Francisco, we hosted our first Advancing Women in Leadership Luncheon — an extensive pre-conference workshop dedicated to helping successful women executives share their experiences for the benefit of other attendees, as well as to help our female members build and strengthen their networks within the industry.

(More: Why the financial advice industry should focus less on diversity and more on inclusion)

Over the course of a full afternoon, attendees at the workshop heard from speakers including Carla Harris, vice chairman for wealth management and managing director at Morgan Stanley, who spoke about key lessons she has learned in the course of her extensive career in the financial services industry. We also learned from Maura Markus, former president and chief operating officer at Bank of the West, who spoke about the importance of including women on corporate boards of directors. And the event was kicked off with words of wisdom by our visionary Amy Webber, president and CEO of Cambridge Investment Research and immediate past chair of the FSI Board.

The workshop also included a panel discussion on “Women in the Corner Office: Perspectives on the Path to President,” which featured four of the most successful female executives in our industry providing crucial insights for attendees who not only seek to scale the upper rungs of their own firms, but to help other women in their organizations do the same.

In seeking to help other women get ahead in the industry — and to position their own companies for continued success — the members of the panel showed a strong inclination for shaking up the traditional, “we’ve always done it that way” approach to business and work/life balance.

“We have to make sure that we are not giving women the same rules that we were asked to follow,” Christine Nigro, vice chairman at AXA Advisors, said. “It’s our responsibility now to start questioning some of those rules, whether it’s work-from-home arrangements or viewing technology as a recruiting and retention investment, because it gives people more flexibility in the way they do business.”

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Ms. Nigro noted that this flexibility must extend to managers’ attitudes toward employees’ needs, particularly when it comes to issues of balancing work and family commitments. Female managers are in an especially strong position to put this mentality into practice and encourage similar attitudes throughout an organization. Ms. Nigro explained, for example, that while she prefers to have her team come to the office to work together, she has been supportive of their requests to work from home as long as they can demonstrate that these arrangements are effective. “Throughout my career, I have never assumed that I have the best idea in the room,” she said. “So I tell them, ‘I’ll support it, but it has to work.’”

Ms. Nigro also noted that developing an eye for opportunities to build a unique skill set — and the willingness to act on them — can be a key differentiator in a rising female professional’s career track.

“Every time I heard about an opportunity within the organization, I just said, ‘Okay, I’ll try that,’” she said. “I didn’t worry so much about whether I was qualified — as long as people had faith in me, I would give it a try. When you take that approach, suddenly you find that you have built up a unique resume and skill set that will really help you stand out within the firm, when it comes time for them to make personnel decisions.”

Another panel member, Brinker Capital CEO Noreen Beaman, fully agreed. “I came out of public accounting. In my mid-thirties, when I was building my career, our chairman told me, ‘You have to go out and sell something,” she said. “So he sends this CPA with my audit bag to work with financial advisers in New York City, and I spent seven years selling Brinker Capital’s products and services there. And had I not done that, I could not sit in this seat here today.”

(More: Women underrepresented in global fund industry, according to Morningstar)

FSI is proud to function as a think tank and hub for our industry and our community, and to facilitate crucial discussions, such as the ones at our Advancing Women in Leadership Luncheon, on the key challenges and opportunities that will help the independent financial services sector stay vital — and play a positive role in the lives of Main Street investors — for years to come.

Dale Brown is president and CEO of the Financial Services Institute.