RBC's head of recruiting, Kristen Kimmell, was tapped for her post in September 2019.
Kristen Kimmell, the new head of Advisor Recruiting and Field Marketing of RBC Wealth Management, recently received a compliment that first unnerved her.
"Someone told me I was 'like a bulldozer,'" which made her wonder if she really had received a compliment, Kimmell said in an interview.
"Once [the person] explained that a trailblazer was someone who ran down unknown paths alone, but I bulldozed the way so everybody can run with me, I realized it was a huge compliment," explained the executive .
That pretty much sums up Kimmell's career, which today means working in the firm's Minneapolis headquarters and helping to find solutions for RBC's 2,000 financial advisors and their clients.
This isn't far from what she planned in high school — where she was one of a graduating class of 38 students in a town of about 700 residents in Northern Minnesota — after a counselor gave her a book of jobs. Being proficient in math, she decided right then that she wanted to be a bond trader.
She started off in the banking world, having graduated from University of Jamestown in North Dakota with a double major in accounting and finance. When a colleague left banking to join Dain Bosworth (later Dain Rauscher), he encouraged her to move there too.
She wasn't familiar with broker-dealers. But she took a chance on the business in 1995 and soon began seeing the complexity of the financial-services industry.
"I am probably wired a bit differently, but I believe [working in the finance or accounting area] is kind of the spine of the organization," she said. "There isn't anything that can happen in an organization that doesn't go through finance — whether it's an invoice payment, booking airfare or all the big trades."
Kimmell cut her teeth on the institutional side, learning everything about her beloved bonds — from where they originated with the investment banker to when they were traded on the secondary market.
"That was a highlight of my career: when I could figure out everything from beginning to end," she said.
In 2000, the Royal Bank of Canada acquired Dain Rauscher; when RBC decided to relocate the institutional operations to New York in 2008, she moved to the retail side of the business. Kimmell then saw how her work directly impacts people, by helping them get set for retirement or fund a child's higher education. "I firmly believe that wealth management is just making a difference in people's lives, … and that's what motivates me," she said.
Did her family introduce her to the business?
"No. My mom was in education; she ran a Head Start program in several counties in Northern Minnesota. My father worked on the railroad. … The reality is nobody ever told me I couldn't do [what I wanted to do]," she explained.
