INTERVIEW: GenSpring's Jewelle Bickford On The Firm's Women And Wealth Initiative

Harriet Davies

13 September 2012

GenSpring Family Offices has seriously ramped up its offering to female clients over the past year, capitalizing on women’s extreme dissatisfaction with the financial services industry to strengthen its appeal among this high-growth market.

Running the program is senior strategist Jewelle Bickford, ex-investment banking supremo and long-time advocate of empowering women. Bickford, who was a partner at Rothschild Group for many years, came into wealth management after “flunking retirement,” she tells Family Wealth Report.

“I retired for a month and decided that even though I didn’t want to be travelling all over the world as an investment banker I would really like to do something, especially using my financial background.”

She feels she’s had a huge advantage from her career: “I’ve had so much confidence in my own financial knowledge, being an investment banker and having managed the family’s wealth until I retired.”

This gave her the skills she needed to navigate the world of wealth management once she had retired and no longer wanted to manage her family’s wealth on a day-to-day basis.

“When I retired, then I knew I couldn’t do it anymore because once you get out of the markets you’re not in touch anymore,” she says.

So, she went to a number of meetings to see where to become a client.

“The way they started was to say: if you sign up with us, you’re going to get much better benefits from your portfolio, much better yield, and we’re going to keep you safe. We’re going to diversify your portfolio. It didn’t quite make sense to me because they didn’t start by asking me how much risk I was willing to take, how much liquidity I needed, and after 2008 that was really extraordinary,” says Bickford.

She was savvy enough to know this wasn’t the right approach for her, but many people – women and men alike – wouldn’t be.

However, she later got talking to Mel Lagomasino, chief executive of GenSpring Family Offices, who invited her to come and work for the firm. Bickford’s financial experience, combined with the board work she had done for many years on women’s empowerment, led to the project that is now the Women and Wealth Initiative.

The idea for the initiative was cemented when a report from Boston Consulting Group revealed that the financial services industry was the industry that women were the most dissatisfied with. The initiative aims to “successfully integrate the life needs of a woman and her financial goals, rather than looking at them in silos – 'life management' and 'portfolio management'. It’s this integration that I think is different from the rest of Wall Street,” says Bickford.

The seminars

This involves tailoring an approach that focuses on the transitions throughout a women’s life, as well as topics that research shows are the most relevant to women, such as the legacy they want to leave and financial security.

“The research shows that women…care most about financial security, whereas men - and of course these are all generalizations - tend to think of their wealth more as a scorecard.”

It also needs to be delivered in a suitable format and, again, research points to the fact that women learn better in groups, through a communal experience.

“We deliver this education in small seminars, in webinars and of course in our annual conference, but we have small seminars on almost anything you can imagine with just six or seven women and the staff from GenSpring.

“Often they meet outside our formal meetings, our seminars, and a lot of them have become very good friends, but they seem to learn better by connection,” she adds.

In this environment, a range of investment know-how emerges, with some clients needing finance 101 while others know a fair bit about the markets but want to know the savvy questions to ask a financial advisor. The important point though is that these issues emerge.

“So a lot of our direction comes from what the women tell us they need…our overall goal is to reduce the intimidation around the finances, and to get them to participate in what we see as a life-long learning process.”

At present, the vast majority of GenSpring’s female clients are women who are married to very successful men, or who have inherited money. “Both those categories are really anxious to learn for themselves” but are “used to delegating this to someone,” says Bickford. That’s why one of the things they’re most anxious to know is how to deal with advisors, and particularly what questions they need to ask.

“A lot of what we talk about is…taking ownership of your wealth: you need to do this because your lifestyle may depend on it.”

Supporting the need for this kind of targeted advice is research showing that 70 per cent of widows change their financial advisors in the first year following their husband’s death. Bickford puts this astonishingly high figure down to the fact women just aren’t happy with the service the FA provides them, but they didn’t even realize while their husband was alive as the advisor really just addressed their partner.

The firm also realizes that, as times change, the profile of its clients will change too.

As such, for its seminars it has drilled down into the specific concerns women have. As well as financial security and the savvy questions to ask an advisor, some of the topics addressed include: blended families and how to maintain wealth over generations when couples are bringing two families together – a “big topic,” says Bickford; writing personal mission statements; money history, which delves into clients’ family history of money and the message this left them about money, and how this affects them today. Also covered is “how to say no,” as “often wealthy women are besieged with requests for money.”

“Clients are interested in everything from what’s new in the news to mindfulness and stress reduction,” says Bickford.

What men want

She says that while she hasn’t observed anything she can categorically say is a broad trend among male clients’ reactions to this program, she has noted some regional quirks.

“In New York, on Wall Street, those men are extremely anxious to have their wives educated,” she says.

Perhaps because it is a huge financial center, she says men in New York, who have tended to work in finance, are particularly keen to know that should anything happen to them their family will be ready to manage their affairs.

While the firm emphasizes that women have always been a focus since its founding in 1989, Bickford has been leading this dedicated effort for just over one year. She has the help of Daisy Medici, director of family governance, and Jill Shipley, director of family education, to implement it across GenSpring’s 14 family offices. She is meeting with advisors across the firm to guide and develop their work with women clients, and believes it can be a real competitive advantage.

To get such initiatives underway, she says it does help having well-known, influential female leaders within the firm. Also, advisors realize that “women are the growth market.” Every big-name firm you’ve ever heard of is talking about women’s programs, she says - a big indicator of the financial value firms are placing on this market. This is also a call to action for those firms who want to be first off the mark in attracting women.

“I mean, you can’t open the papers without seeing it,” says Bickford.