July 28, 2023
Mindy Diamond Quoted
by Victoria Zhuang

Wealth management veteran executive Kate Healy likes to tell the story about the time she was buying a car about 15 years ago. While she was waiting at the dealership, a man from the finance department walked in.

“My credit report was printing out. And he didn’t know [whose] it was. And he just said, ‘Hey, who has this client?'” Healy said.

When Healy said she was the person in question, the man was surprised.

“He walked over. He goes, ‘Wow, you have a really good credit score.’ And I’m not kidding, he patted me on the head.”

Healy, the former managing director of the CFP Board’s Center for Financial Planning (which she left recently to start her own consulting practice), said in an interview that while things have come a long way since that day, the industry still has far to go in catching up to serve women investors, as well as women advisors.

Mindy Diamond, the founder and CEO of industry recruiting firm Diamond Consultants, said in an interview that wealth management firms had frequently expressed interest in hiring more diverse advisors and employees, which suggests the problem may be not lack of intention among HR directors but sometimes rather confusion over how to win those candidates.

“As a woman myself, I get probably more calls than most recruiters do, from firms looking for us to help them to increase their ranks of female advisors,” Diamond said.

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