Zack Hubbard’s first gig in the wealth management industry was an operations associate at RBC Wealth Management. It was the simple pleasures of processing paperwork, answering phones and greeting clients that made the director of financial planning and participant engagement at Virginia-based Greenspring Advisors fall in love with the industry.
“I was fortunate to have a lot of really great mentors there and be afforded the opportunity to work through a lot of different roles and capacities and really learn a ton,” Hubbard says.
Citing his passion to “expand access to everyone for advice,” he left RBC to become a participant advisor at Greenspring. He has since developed the firm’s platform, leading the financial planning team.
“There's 60 thousand people that roll up to that platform. They have access to one-on-one advice anytime from a CFP, which is a good start, but we still have a lot more that we want to serve,” he admits. “That's my driving mission: to expand access to everybody for financial planning advice.”
His driving mission is one of the reasons Hubbard is being recognized for as an InvestmentNews Awards 2024 Excellence Awardee, with the winners announced on June 20 at 583 Park Avenue, New York City in a glitzy, red carpet ceremony. Click here to register to attend.
Reflecting on his role as a financial advisor, Hubbard highlights the best feeling in the world is “giving somebody permission to do something that they've always wanted to do, but never thought they could.”
“It is challenging, we don't get to do it very often,” he said. Part of that is because there's not a lot of people that have access to it and there are a lot of people that still aren’t ready to take that next step. We're still trying to figure out how we're going to stretch $20 ready to make the end of the week.
The biggest challenge he’s working out is getting to client’s financial habits earlier. “How do we get to people when they're just starting out and help them develop and nail down those good habits right away?”
Also, Orion has added BlackRock, Fidelity, and Vanguard to its custom portfolios suite, and RedBlack has set up a new headquarters after crossing a trillion-dollar milestone.
Also, New York-based Legacy Edge Advisors names its first-ever CEO, while Novare Capital Management hires a Vanguard veteran with a multigenerational planning focus.
Asset managers are racing to bring private market products to retirement plans, but cost and liquidity concerns linger.
Treasury's latest tax-exemption crackdown on private schools lands in the wake of a separate push to restrict refundable credits for some immigrant filers.
Workforce trust measures predicted which companies came out ahead during COVID-19. The same dynamic may now be playing out across the AI transition — and the data suggests the spread could be just as wide.
Northern Trust’s Ken Lassner shows advisors how to convert volatility into after-tax portfolio gains
Dan Biagini of American Equity says the steady decline of pensions, longer lifespans and a reset in interest rates are rewriting how advisors build retirement income
