TD Ameritrade's recent National LINC 2020 conference in Orlando, Florida, featured candid talk about the advisory industry's diversity and inclusion problem and the need to create a more welcoming environment for women.
Kate Healy, managing director of Generation Next at TD Ameritrade Institutional, moderated a D&I conversation panel at the conference in which advisors and industry executives pointed to incidents they themselves had experienced in their careers as members of what is still largely a white male-dominated industry.
For example, Lazetta Rainey Braxton, founder and CEO of Baltimore, Maryland-based RIA Financial Fountains, told attendees she resigned a few years ago from a wealth management firm after it didn't stand up for her when a potential new client made a derogatory comment about African Americans.
Instead of declining the business of that client, "they took the client on," recalled Braxton, who is African American. She looked into her legal rights in the matter, but "because the client said it at the client's home, there was no recourse for me" and the firm "knew that as well, too," she said. The firm, therefore, just "kind of skirt-tailed over" the issue, she told attendees, noting the incident "was the catalyst I needed to start" her own firm.
In addition, "I didn't want anybody else to go through what I went through, so I decided to pour my energy into volunteerism" for the Association of African American Financial Advisors, she told attendees.
Under the leadership of that organization's president, she set up an annual conference "because I wanted a gathering where I saw people who looked like me, who were doing exceptional things who were not honored for their craft and for what they brought to their profession," she explained. That event is now in its seventh year, she noted, adding the goal is to "focus on the next generation of African-American financial planners."
(On Monday, Braxton and another advisor, Rianka Dorsainvil, debuted their new virtual firm, 2050 Wealth Partners.)
In one jaw-dropping moment, Dasarte Yarnway, a financial advisor and founder of San Francisco-based RIA Berknell Financial Group, recalled that while working as the only African American man at one firm, its CEO claimed during a staff meeting that the worst thing that ever happened to the U.S. was the abolishment of slavery.
Noting that everybody in the room turned to look at him, he said, "it was that moment that I decided that I could create a firm" where he could "create a safe space that would allow us to serve everyone and do it in the fairest way possible."
Summit Sexism
The challenges that women face while attending financial services industry conferences, meanwhile, gained a huge spotlight last year, after off-color comments made by Ken Fisher at the Tiburon CEO Summit went public.
