M. P.Dunleavey writre: Imagine that you work for a financial company. You’ve plowed through stacks of research showing that women — who are increasingly educated and affluent — could be a big source of revenue for you. Now what? Do you paint the reception area a nice shade of coral? Put handbag hooks on the bathroom doors? Provide sensitivity training to your staff?
If you’re thinking that it can’t be that hard to bring female customers in the door, let me bring you up to speed: Women control trillions of dollars of wealth in the United States, yet as clients, they pose a challenge to Wall Street’s traditional way of doing business.
Every year at its national conference, for example, TD Ameritrade offers a seminar for advisers on working with women as clients, and it’s always jam-packed. This session is attended mostly by men, and they’re struggling. Some are thrown by women’s high question-asking quotient, she said; many male advisers wonder whether they should just stay out of the way and have women deal with women.
Research shows that women as clients don’t necessarily prefer to work with female advisers — any more than they want pink-themed websites. Women don’t need different products or services. Mutual funds and that work for men ought to be fine for women, too. But women need to be approached differently than men do.
Companies know this, yet there’s a frustrating lack of agreement about how to go about it. Companies like Merrill Lynch and Vanguard lean toward what I’ll call a more gender-agnostic approach, focusing more on a client’s individual situation. TD Ameritrade, Ameriprise, Barclays and Pax World Investments are among those that seem to be trying to embrace a financial style that is more overtly friendly to women, like companies that focus on women as leaders.
Vanguard learned through a two-year study, many women prefer advisers to focus on life goals, and not just on mutual funds and other investments. Likewise at Merrill Lynch, there’s a conviction that gender “can be a distraction in financial planning,” said Michael Liersch, head of behavioral finance at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. To that end, the company is training advisers to use a proprietary tool called the Investor Personality Assessment to give advisers a more objective way to evaluate each client’s goals..
A survey of 6,000 people in the United States, Britain China, India, Singapore and Hong Kong, suggests that women don’t necessarily lack moxie, skill or interest in money. But they’re often turned off by how money is handled in a mostly male world of finance.
Many women today prefer companies and advisers with gender smarts. That means being able to field questions on virtually all aspects of a woman’s life, understanding how time-constrained most women feel, and not taking a one-size-fits-all-women approach to planning.
So what approach is best for women — and how can Wall Street accelerate its efforts to adjust to their needs? Finance has a long and hidebound history, and it may well be necessary to take a traditional approach to get the ball rolling faster.
How about giving advisers a bonus when they bring in more women as clients? If coral-colored reception areas do the trick, great. But for the sake of creating financial parity at long last, I’m inclined to think there’s nothing like a carrot to get people moving.
