Close Close
Sign In
Newsletters
Popular Financial Topics Discover relevant content from across the suite of ALM legal publications From the Industry More content from ThinkAdvisor and select sponsors Investment Advisor Issue Gallery Read digital editions of Investment Advisor Magazine Tax Facts Get clear, current, and reliable answers to pressing tax questions
Luminaries Awards
Podcast Center Video Center Webcasts Resource Center Events
About ThinkAdvisor Contact Us Advertise With Us Asset & Logo Licensing Sitemap Terms of Service Privacy Policy Copyright © 2024 ALM Global, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
ThinkAdvisor

Industry Spotlight > Women in Wealth

How to Keep Female Clients After the Loss of a Spouse

By Teresa J.W. Bailey

X
Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

What You Need to Know

  • Both spouses should be brought into financial conversations early in the advisor-client relationship.
  • Advisors may want to consider looking to their operational support team for assistance.
  • Women older than 60 were raised in a world where they were excluded from financial matters.

One of the most significant and ever-present challenges facing the financial industry is the insufficiency of retaining female clients after they experience the loss of their husbands or partners. According to Thrivent, 70% of women leave their financial advisor within the year of their spouse’s death. 

While we understand the need for those experiencing loss to connect with their financial advisors in a timely manner, identifying and rectifying the root cause of this drawback is even more important. 

In my experience, three core issues prompt women to leave their advisors after this pivotal event:

  1. The husband or partner typically handled the financial relationships.
  2. Men in the financial industry tend to relate more to the husband, leaving women to feel a lack of empathy and relatability. 
  3. The financial industry relies on industry jargon and hypermasculine speech, creating additional confusion and stress and highlighting the inequivalent financial education that many women face. 

If the industry truly hopes to improve its support of female clients, several adjustments must be considered. 

Personal Connection

To better retain and support female clients after their partner’s passing, advisors must create effective financial relationships with them long before these life-altering events.

According to Forbes’ coverage of a New York Life study’s findings, “Half those surveyed said their financial advisor is incapable of connecting with them on a personal level by taking time to understand their specific needs.” 

Nurturing long-term partnerships would make it more appropriate for financial advisors to reach out to the individual and offer condolences and support, essentially providing a helping hand, easing financial stress and solidifying a trusting partnership.

If an advisor has not established a strong relationship with the female client before a partner’s passing, the advisor should still take the time to reach out, make the connection and set up a meeting. An advisor should not delay in contacting the widow; some of the most vital work and financial decisions need to be coordinated in the first few weeks following the loss. 

Female clients should be introduced into the conversations regarding their personal and familial wealth earlier in the advisor-client relationship alongside their husbands or partners. This will bolster their confidence and understanding of individual and family finances for generations to come. 

Empathy and Understanding

Financial advisors’ relationships with women often fall by the wayside because they tend to relate more to their male clients. This can result in advisors having less practice in addressing female clients who may, in fact, need more financial education than their male counterparts. 

This can be due to laws and societal norms that made it difficult for women to be financially independent. For example, it was legal to deny a woman a credit card on the basis of sex until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. 

For advisors, learning to ask questions and providing emotional and educational support to overcome some of those generational limitations is invaluable. It is crucial to take it one step at a time, whether that is by sharing what you would do if you were in their shoes or simply listening to their concerns.

Realistically, these women don’t need their advisor to explain how the watch is made; they need to be told the time in the moments when it’s needed.

If advisors want to be students of empathy, they may want to consider looking to their operational support team for assistance. These individuals are most often women and can assist in guiding them through messaging. 

Connecting with female clients is all about slowing down and asking the right questions. 

Accessible Language

One crucial detail in discussing how to communicate with and understand female clients is that financial advisors must practice being more mindful in their word choices. That means a foundation of more approachable, plain English.  

Using language filled with jargon with a woman who is already experiencing an emotional and taxing life event often results in unintentional confusion and intimidation. This is common because women, especially those older than 60, were raised in a world where they were excluded from financial conversations and even credit cards could be secured only in their husbands’ names. 

This background means that women have a different relationship with or approach to financial education than many of their male peers. 

With this in mind, all advisors — both men and women — should aim to de-prioritize the jargon that has become the norm in the wealth management industry and begin to tell stories to illustrate concepts. 

Whether you are looking to make these adjustments as an individual or implement them in an organization, actions like including a client’s wife in estate planning efforts, asking both spouses to be present for an annual financial planning update, practicing an increased sense of empathy and using less jargon while asking more questions will make a world of difference in connecting with and retaining a female client or widow.

Implementing these small changes should effectively lessen the frequency of widows leaving their husbands’ financial advisors and begin to turn the tide on women and wealth.

Teresa J.W. Bailey is a senior wealth strategist and president of Waddell & Associates, a financial advisory firm based in Nashville, Tennessee.

NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.