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Figure 1.4
What is the primary source of your household assets?
(Women by wealth source)
Indeed, the most remarkable finding to emerge from our inquiry is that the purse is vast and growing because women are increasingly generating, and not just dispensing, its contents. They’re women like Laurie Ann Goldman, former CEO of Spanx, the shapewear behemoth, who started her journey up the ladder—as chairman of Coca-Cola prior to Spanx—at her childhood dinner table where she used to compete in a family quiz show.22 They’re women like Peggy Yu, cofounder of dangdang.com, the largest online retailer in China.23 They’re women like Helena Morrissey, CEO of Newton Investments, who oversees a portfolio of some £55 billion.24 And they’re women like Megan Ellison, who, while set to inherit some of her father’s $50.3 billion (Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s net worth in April 2014),25 has leveraged her wealth to create and run Annapurna Pictures, a film production and distribution company with two of its 2013 pictures nominated for multiple Academy Awards.26
These are women for whom leveraging wealth is important, not merely to assure them and their loved ones of financial security, but also to empower them as change agents. They work hard and dream big. And to achieve their goals and realize their larger agenda, they require sound advice and high-level expertise.
But whether they seek this expertise from a wealth management professional or from the Internet, from a family member or from a financial advisor, is largely up to the industry to determine. To harness the power of the purse, broker dealers, boutique firm owners, private bankers, and wealth managers must convince women that an advisory relationship is the best way to grow their assets, fulfill their needs, and achieve their dreams.
As we’ll see in the next chapter, that’s an imperative the industry has yet to grasp.
2
Money Left on the Table
After her father’s death, Melanie,* an equity partner at a prominent professional services firm, recognized she needed a new advisor to help manage her assets. At 48, she had amassed significant wealth, enough to bump her into the high-net-worth (HNW) category of investor—a fact she found astonishing. But she had also inherited her father’s estate, which was ridden with debt. And she had recently decided to take a sabbatical from her firm to explore launching a new business. In short, she wanted an advisor who could help her sort out the mess of her father’s estate and put her own money to work so that she could fund her aspirations.
What happened in her subsequent meetings with prospective firms sorely tested her trust in wealth management. As a HNW prospect, Melanie says, she anticipated personal attention and a committed effort to understand her: her current situation, her near-future plans, and her long-term goals and financial needs. Instead, she was shown proposals that repeatedly failed to take into consideration what she had spelled out in terms of her near- and long-term goals: taking a sabbatical and living off of her investments while she pursued her dream job. She also found herself repeatedly forced to counter assumptions about her wealth status. “Each of the advisors with whom I met assumed that my assets were attributable to my father’s estate, rather than my own hard work,” says this daughter of immigrants who put herself through graduate school on a $20 weekly food budget. The last straw, she says, was when she was encouraged to reallocate some of her current investments to incorporate higher-fee in-house products. Despite having no background in finance, Melanie could see the numbers didn’t add up in her favor. “I found it very insulting,” she says. “They kept talking about my ‘family’ wealth, my philanthropic ‘obligations.’ It was a total disconnect.”
In the end, Melanie wound up staying with her father’s institution and changing her advisor. She’s not particularly happy, but doesn’t wish to invest any more energy shopping for the ideal relationship. “The guys I was meeting with elsewhere had a real opportunity because I was eager to work with a new institution,” she notes. “But they didn’t want to listen or take the time to understand my needs.”
Untapped, or Tapped and Misunderstood
Female wealth isn’t connecting with the wealth management industry. Many women have advisors whom they don’t particularly trust or feel understand them, or they don’t have advisors at all. Many women we spoke with were seeking an advisor, but struggled to find one that understood them.
The majority of female wealth in the world is, in fact, currently unmanaged. Women in Asia are the most underserved: 61% in Hong Kong, 57% in India, and 56% in Singapore say they don’t have an advisor. When we segment the prospective female investor market by wealth level, age, and wealth source, certain populations emerge as particularly underserved. For example, in Hong Kong, fully 70% of female inheritors lack advisors. Fifty-three percent of female millionaires in the UK lack a financial advisor, as do 75% of women under 40 in the US. Female wealth, our data shows, is surprisingly untapped.
Figure 2.1
Do not currently have a financial advisor
(Women)
Most of those who do have an advisor, however, aren’t very happy. The vast majority of our sample feel their advisor does “not understand” them. This trend holds true across all subsegments of the female market, irrespective of age and asset levels. The wealth-generating segment in Asia feels strongly misunderstood: 86% of creators in Hong Kong, 83% of creators in Singapore, and 76% of creators in India report this disconnect. The under 40 segment and women with over $1 million of assets feel particularly misunderstood in the US (where 72% and 51% feel their advisor is out of touch). And women who inherit from their husbands are also dissatisfied, at least in the UK. More than 70% of widows fire their financial professionals within a year of their husband’s deaths.27
Figure 2.2
My advisor does not understand me
(Women)
Women who do have a financial advisor seem to be opting out of traditional private bank and broker dealer models. Our data shows a strong preference among women in every country except Hong Kong and Singapore for boutique firms, which tend to offer their clients a more holistic wealth management approach with customized planning, investments, and charitable giving strategies. In the US, women are 6.4 times more likely to work with a boutique firm than a private bank, and 61% more likely to work with a boutique firm than a broker dealer.
Figure 2.3
What type of advisor is your primary financial advisor?
(Women)
Our qualitative findings shed light on why. Focus groups and interviews we conducted in the US, the UK, and India with high-net-worth women and female investors relying on bankers and broker dealers portrayed an industry profoundly out of touch with its clients. Many complained of overt and unconscious bias. Sunita, a professor based in Mumbai, left a large international private bank because “every time I wanted to buy something or make a decision about my account our relationship manager would call my husband to make sure he knew.” Jennifer, a business owner in New York,
