The advisory world is changing, and its female leaders know that more than anyone.
COVER STORY
Women In Planning
The advisory world is changing, and its female leaders know that more than anyone.
BY FA STAFF
FEMALE ADVISORS STILL MAKE UP SOMEWHERE AROUND ONLY A QUARTER OF THE financial advice industry, according to various sources like AdvizorPro and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. And that’ s a problem, because women are going to be big inheritors of wealth over the next couple of decades. They’ re also going to be intimately involved in estate planning and caregiving issues that will be critical to financial advisors trying to understand their clients and what they’ re going through.
For this month’ s cover story, Financial Advisor magazine sat down with some of the most high-profile women in the advisory business and asked them how they got their start, why they thought planning was important, what they think it is and what it’ s going to become.
Their backgrounds are all different. Kelly Henning, for instance, said she stumbled into wealth management as a college junior. Marguerita Cheng came into the industry as a careerchanger with two young children. Kristen Bauer started her career as an accountant before the family office world beckoned her into its ranks. They all found a world both welcoming and confounding, with the career paths often unclear.
Hannah Moore realized there was an opportunity in the industry’ s failure to create career paths for young advisors and founded an early training program called“ the Externship.” She says that when she joined the profession it was disorienting.
“ There was a lot of confusing noise that I didn’ t know how to interpret,” she says.“ I was never given a framework for understanding how to serve clients.”
They also talk about what they think women’ s roles will be in the industry in the future. The ways into planning are diverse for everybody, and that’ s true even for women. Yet they agree in some instances that financial advising has as much to do with psychology and behavior and counseling as it does investing. They also talk about the need for financial literacy for women, who are going to need a great deal of it over the next couple of decades.
MARCH / APRIL 2026 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 33