The Future of Wealth Management Is Female

It wasn’t until the U.S. Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that women could universally open bank accounts, get credit cards, and apply for loans without needing a male co-signer. Fifty years later, women in America now control more wealth than at any other time in history. And their share is continuing to grow. By the end of the decade, women will command $34 trillion of the country’s investable assets—a huge jump from the $7.3 trillion they controlled just 10 years ago. 

Women live longer than men, according to the CDC. Younger, affluent women are getting more involved in financial strategies. And the proportion of women in high-level corporate posts is rising, per McKinsey & Co. Over the next several decades, the Great Transfer of Wealth will free up more than $80 trillion in assets—some of which will be placed in the hands of women entrepreneurs and inheritors. Local business leaders Merrilee Kick and Jamie O’Banion have already sold the companies they founded for millions of dollars. According to McKinsey & Co., retaining baby boomer women as clients could translate to wealth management firms seeing one-third higher revenue potential.  

The trends are colliding to create a sizeable shift in financial power. But it hasn’t yet rippled to the wealth management industry. Only about 15 percent of U.S. wealth advisers are female. Those numbers haven’t changed since Dallas-area veterans like Frances Gardner of Gardner Wallace and Debra Brennan Tagg of BFS Advisory Group began their careers in the 1990s. 

Both women forged their own paths into the wealth management sphere. Tagg entered the industry following a marketing stint in Los Angeles with Time Warner Group. Gardner began pursuing credentials to become a certified financial planner after earning a finance degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1985. 

Other high-achieving women advisers in DFW have followed, including Pallavi Srivastava, a director of investments at Tolleson Wealth Management, and Jamie Ford, a vice president at Morgan Stanley. 

There are reasons for these four leaders to be optimistic about their career choices. Dallas is becoming a hotspot for financial services. The Texas Stock Exchange is trying to get a foothold on the hotly contested “Y’all Street.” The New York Stock Exchange launched NYSE Texas. And Nasdaq is bringing a second headquarters to Dallas. Other major financial institutions are expanding—Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are building $500 million campuses in Uptown Dallas and Las Colinas, respectively. 

Momentum is building—and Dallas is emerging as a powerful epicenter of that change.

Evolving Investment Priorities

As she made her way up the ranks, Gardner remembers routinely being one of the only women at various wealth management conferences. “I’d go to events where the only other women would be the women checking you in,” she says. Gardner entered the industry in 1990 and has since risen to the top as an award-winning adviser in the region.

Early in her career, male clients hired Gardner because they believed she would connect with their wives. When working with couples, Gardner says, “I never say, ‘Trust me.’ I never say, ‘I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry, honey, I know what I’m doing.’ It’s patronizing.”

Instead, she makes sure her clients understand what she’s showing them. She tells her clients to take their time, and she always asks the same question: “What are you most worried about?” 

Over the years, she has noticed a shift in responses. “Women never want to be a burden to their children,” Gardner says. And women who don’t have children are also thorough and thoughtful in their planning, she adds. “They make sure all their I’s are dotted, and all their T’s are crossed until the day they die. Who will take care of them? They don’t run out of money. They have all the long-term care insurance. They know who they want to help them, who their guardian would be, who their executor would be. Again, the underlying thing with women is they never want to be a burden.”

In a 2020 report declaring women as the next growth phase in wealth management, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. noted differences in how affluent women approach wealth management compared to their male counterparts. Women are more likely to seek professional advice and less likely to feel confident about their financial discernment—women are also more willing to pay a premium for in-person financial advice. Women tend to be less risk-tolerant and more focused on life goals. Men are less likely to identify a life event as motivation to seek guidance. 

 “Men are very results-driven,” says Ford at Morgan Stanley. “They want to know what their returns will be, how much money they’re going to make—it’s very black and white, and it’s very transactional. Women are much more holistic.”  

Ford’s female clients tend to have weddings or grandchildren to plan for and think about. And they’re accounting for the possibility of outliving their accrued wealth. “I have a couple of female CEOs who support their mother, sister, kids, and charities,” Ford says.  

A former elementary school teacher, Ford came from a family of advisers—her father made sure to teach her the ins and outs of investing. After a stint fundraising for a children’s museum in South Carolina, she was recruited by Merrill Lynch. She started as an assistant, fetching coffee and delivering mail, but eventually fell in love with the entrepreneurial opportunities and flexible schedule that came with being an adviser. 

She got her MBA from Texas A&M in 2012 and began working as a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch two years later, building her book of business in Austin. In 2020, she pivoted to Morgan Stanley, where her client base doubled, then tripled, with many career women and tech executives in her portfolio. Since moving to Dallas, she has noticed new dynamics—younger clients, just as many men as women (her portfolio is now about 50-50), and first-generation wealth creators. 

She has also noticed a different trend. “I can open $15 million accounts on any given day,” Ford says. “And a lot of that is men who think, ‘I want my wife to work with someone she feels comfortable with.’ I get several men who are CEOs, and they travel and live out of state predominantly, but their wives are here and deal with the finances. They will reach out to me and say, ‘I think you’d be a good fit for my wife.’” 

Brennan Tagg says her top layer of clients has evolved over the years to become women business owners. Half of her clients are in female-led households. “Women have been totally misunderstood in finance,” she says. She points to a pamphlet on her desk from another firm that lists eight reasons why it’s harder for women to succeed in financial planning than men—Brennan Tagg has a stack of similar flyers in the back. 

“The unfortunate thing that we’ve done is we look at how men are successful with their financial plans, and we compare everything to that instead of saying, ‘This is actually what women want,’” she continues. “It’s not like women want less money. It’s not like women aren’t going to hold us accountable for our performance. It’s not like women want to overpay for fees.”

What women tend to care about, she says, is if there is enough money for cash reserves to take family on vacation, to put kids through college, and to retire. In some instances, that extends to preparing for divorce. Brennan Tagg says there has been a marked trend over the last three years of women approaching her firm for that life event. “They don’t get jazzed about dying on the big pile of money,” she says. 

A 2023 study published by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards indicated that women are more likely to prioritize things like emergency funds, healthcare costs, philanthropy, and planning or long-term care needs, while men tend to focus on things like reducing taxable income, paying off a mortgage, retirement, and planning to leave a financial inheritance. Both tend to focus on paying off student loans, saving for home downpayments, saving for children’s education, paying off credit card debt, and making sure they have enough money to live comfortably. 

Pallavi Srivastava has had her own journey navigating the evolving industry. After earning her Master of Science in finance, she worked as an endowment and gift accounting analyst at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She became a wealth strategy associate at UBS Financial Services in 2011 and, after taking time off to raise her children, embarked on a career with stops at firms in Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 2020, she moved to Texas to take on a role as a senior investment analyst with View Capital Advisors. She joined Tolleson in 2022 and was named a director last year. 

“In general, I hope for women to find their voice,” Srivastava says, “and to not be afraid of vocalizing and saying, ‘This is what I want. I don’t know how to get there, but this is what I want to do with my wealth.’ Having that kind of a voice and not shying away from saying it will make a big difference.” 

Standing on a Fault Line

When she was 12, Brennan Tagg’s father made a change that would impact the entire family. He decided to switch careers in 1983 and launch Brennan Financial Services. A young Brennan Tagg watched her dad grow the firm and his profile, landing radio interviews and soaring as an entrepreneur. After earning a marketing degree at Villanova University, she worked in PR for bands and labels in Los Angeles before joining the family business in 1998. 

“I thought when I went to college that I would probably go do something and then come back into the family firm,” she says. “It was wildly interesting to me that my dad could do what he wanted to do, that he could run his own firm, be an entrepreneur, but then also be this service to families. That people would come to him. They trusted him.” 

Her career flourished, too. So much so that she launched her own firm in 2021. Despite the success she and her peers have enjoyed, they’re still a rarity in the industry. A 2023 report by advisory firm Carson revealed that women make up around 23.7 percent of CFP professionals. 

Gardner finds this perplexing. “It’s an industry which I’m really surprised more women are not in,” she says. “You can put your foot to the pedal and work harder, make more. You can lift your foot off the pedal and make less.” That makes it an ideal role for a mother raising children. However, she adds, it takes about 10 years to “make it” in the industry, which presents a risk.   

According to Srivastava, investment strategies are shifting in a big way. “Where I have seen success, and I truly feel that’s where the puck is going, is making it less transactional and more client-centric,” she says. That could equate to values-based investing or philanthropy work, or it could mean an interest in trust and estate planning. “People and wealth advisers, management teams, who can shift that and change that perspective to make it especially bespoke for the clients and their needs, are going to be successful,” Srivastava says. 

Brennan Tagg believes it’s a challenge for women to change careers and enter the wealth management space because it almost always means taking some sort of financial step backward. More than anything, the skillset required is good counseling.  

“You have to know the financial stuff, but if you’re a smart cookie, you can learn all that stuff,” she says. “You must want to serve and help people and be patient with people. You must want to be with people as they age.”  

She sees a silver lining in Texas’ education landscape—Texas Tech, SMU, and UT-Austin all offer CFP programs. In addition, the University of North Texas offers the state’s only in-person Bachelor of Business Administration for financial planning. 

“I think the universities are getting to a place where they’re going to help kids at the right age in their lives understand that it’s not that you just go into accounting or investment banking,” Brennan Tagg says. “There’s this other wonderful thing that needs a lot of smart people because we don’t have enough people in this industry.” That piece may help balance the scale of industry representation, she adds. 

“It just drives me crazy to think that I know that this is such a wonderful career in so many ways and that a lot of women don’t know about it—and plenty of men know about it,” Brennan Tagg says. “I’m happy for the men to keep doing it. This doesn’t need to be like a ‘rah, rah women and down with men’ thing. … I just want more women to be exposed to this career; I think the more women who are exposed to the career, the more they will help other women.”

Female wealth advisers are in demand. Case in point: Last year, as BFS Advisory Group transitioned between back-office partners, Brennan Tagg received numerous unsolicited offers to buy her firm. She asked each prospective buyer why they wanted to buy her out. “The answer was the same over and over again, ‘Because Dallas-Fort Worth is the hottest market right now for wealth management, and we don’t have an anchor there, and we don’t have a female anchor,’” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, a female anchor in Dallas-Fort Worth is a hot commodity?’ So, I decided, if I’m such a hot commodity now, I’d like to keep the firm and keep growing.” 

As gender shifts in the control of wealth, investment strategies, and the industry itself continue to evolve, women will play a leading role. “The more women who are asking for things to be done a certain way,” Brennan Tagg says, “the more our industry will change.”