Discrimination in Financial Advisory jobs?

Nowadays, as you have certainly already noticed, there are statistics about almost every topic you could think about. Statistics is something that you come across all the time when you are passionate like we are about Finance. We have recently looked at different studies in respect of relation between races, gender and money management. As you could easily expect from the word “races” these studies are US-based. In fact, there are few other countries where race is such an important topic. One of these studies has shown that less than 4% of US Financial advisors are not White nor Asian. At the same time, 13% of American self-identify as being black or African American. An even larger part of the US population is made of non-white Latinos. Similarly, other studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of clients of financial advisors were White or Asian. The Center for Financial planning believes that changes need to be made in the profession in order to create a more diverse and sustainable financial planning profession. It turns out however that a vast majority of the clients do not care about the appearance of their advisers. Instead, they are looking for experience, knowledge and above all performance. Performance being often linked to experience and knowledge. It is also interesting to see that several other studies have also shown that blacks, generally speaking, are less likely to invest in stocks than whites because they are more conservative investors. This would need to be changed as well if minorities want to make more with their money.

The topics that good financial advisors should master

Like in many other industries and jobs, there are good (some are excellent) financial advisors and some that are less competent. Financial advisers should have the skills to independently advise individuals regardless of the complexity of their financial matters, Privacy should also be a key concern for a good financial advisor. One of the difficulties of the job is that a financial advisor should be able to address many different topics. These topics include (but are not limited) to Real Estate, Stocks investments, Insurance, Pensions and everything related to inheritance. Real Estate is a large topic. The advises needed by the client can be related to their own property (the one they live in) but it can also be a property that they own and rent. Of course, the nature of the advise will greatly vary between the two. Another large topic is related to investments in stocks. More than being a large topic, this is actually without any doubt a very complex one. Investing in stocks can seem easy at first glance but making money consistently on the stock markets is definitely not an easy thing to do. The financial advisor job is to understand his or her client’s profile and to provide him/her the best advises based on his/her unique characteristics. Insurance is less complex but requires a lot of knowledge. Pensions is of critical importance while inheritance closely related to household wealth. Divorces, remarriage and other unexpected changes make it difficult to tease apart the independent contribution of inheritances to wealth but without any doubt this is a key element.