Women take the lead at Advisor Group

The financial advice industry publicly clamors for diversity, but the history of hiring women and minorities at many large firms has been so lousy for decades, it's impossible not to question the sincerity of the industry's effort.

Many large broker-dealers appear to tout their efforts, making grand public statements about their meetings for women financial advisers or their women's advisory boards or next-gen adviser summits on diversity and inclusion. But where are the women in leadership roles to make this shift happen?

The imperative for having more women in charge of brokerage and advisory firms is pretty clear — women are currently much more likely to enroll in college than men, and the gender gap widened significantly in 2020, according to a recent report from Brookings. That means women in the future will have more control of the nation's wealth and be right in the middle of the much heralded $84 trillion multigenerational wealth transfer.

So, the broad financial advice industry, with roughly 320,000 licensed salespeople and advisers, had better get busy finding female job candidates and advisers.

One giant network of independent broker-dealers, Advisor Group Inc., has quietly assembled a leadership team with six of the 14 senior executive positions filled by women. Another woman, Desiree Sii, is CEO and president of one of its broker-dealers, SagePoint Financial Inc.

That's an uncommonly large number of women atop a network of six broker-dealers that have close to 11,000 financial advisers and registered reps. A scan of the websites of a handful of Advisor Group's competitors shows a smattering of women in senior roles but their presence does not nearly match Advisor Group's hiring of women to run the show.

The senior women at Advisor Group have been promoted internally, as well as hired from other large organizations.

Wirehouse veteran Jamie Price is the president and CEO of the enterprise, which tapped Erinn Ford last year to be the network's executive vice president of advisor engagement. Before that, Ford had worked as the former CEO of Advisor Group subsidiary broker-dealer KMS Financial and had also been president of Cetera Advisors. A few months later, Advisor Group hired Kristen Kimmell as executive vice president of business development, meaning recruiting, from RBC Capital Markets, a leading regional broker-dealer.

"It’s impressive," said Jodie Papike, president of Cross-Search, a recruiting firm. "Having a women’s summit or leadership council at a firm is not insignificant, but most women advisers are looking for representation. And for an adviser who’s looking for diversity, it’s a pretty big deal."

"Advisor Group had a strategic intention over the last several years, before Kristen and I started last year, for a firm with greater diversity and more women, not only C-suite, but at the rest of the firm," Ford said in an interview this week. "When we have an inclusive and diverse group of employees, it leads to a diversity of thought. We see that as critical."

"It's in the DNA of our culture for women to have the opportunity to contribute," she added.

"It comes down to leadership," Kimmell said during the interview, pointing to CEO Price and Greg Cornick, president of advice and wealth management, who make diversity a priority and a core belief. "And the firm isn't only hiring women into management positions but is bringing women into roles to generate revenue."

According to InvestmentNews data, Advisor Group reported that 33.4% of its financial advisers were women in 2021, well above the industry's average, which is in the neighborhood of 20%, depending on the study released that week.

Advisor Group is far from alone in having women at the top of the corporate heap in the brokerage or registered investment adviser industry: Amy Webber is president and CEO of Cambridge Investment Research Inc., and Penny Pennington is managing partner at Edward Jones.

But it's always impressive to see a plan and philosophy that focuses on hiring women yield some results, and that appears to be happening at Advisor Group. It's not easy to change the outlook of a large organization like this, and an industry observer would have to wonder if the attitudes about hiring women and minorities have really changed at some other large organizations.

It's just one firm, but Advisor Group should be highlighted considering that the securities industry has paid lip service to hiring women and minorities for years.