Some focus their practices on ethnic groups that have been underserved.

Shashin G. Shah, of Financial Design Group in Dallas, has had a specialty in serving the Indian community since he started as an advisor ten years ago. As the son of immigrant Indian parents himself, Shah says it was a natural progression. His initial clients were family friends and relatives. Others soon followed through word-of-mouth referrals.

Shah says the relationships he has with his Indian clients are especially strong. So strong, in fact, that he expects to be the advisor to the majority of his Indian clients' children.

It's not just a matter of his clients looking for someone with an Indian surname. Some of his Indian clients have trusting relationships with non-Indian professionals as well. Yet in a field where personal relationships are a key factor, Shah says his familiarity with his Indian clients' language and culture are undeniably important.

He cites, for example, a client who came to him a few years ago looking to spend $750,000 on his daughter's wedding. While other planners might have fallen off their chair, Shah, aware of Indian family values and how the culture views matrimony, immediately started helping the client decide from where to take the money.

"What differentiates me is they understand I know the culture. I'm not shocked when they want to pull out 10% of their net worth for their daughter's wedding," he says. "The trust is there. They like knowing I've been back to India six times and I know a lot of the same places they do back home."

Many of the small but growing number of minority financial advisors are finding themselves in a similar position: making a specialty out of serving their ethnic communities. In many cases, as with Shah, the specialty comes through a natural progression-growing out of a shared language, culture and values. It is also true that by focusing on their ethnic communities, some of these advisors are bringing their service to communities that have been historically underserved by the larger financial services companies.

The lack of financial planning services in minority communities is partly due to the fact that minorities are under-represented in the financial planning field itself. Surveys last year by the CFP Board of Standards, for example, show that about 94.75% of CFP certificants are white. Asian-Americans represent 2.36% of certificants, Hispanics 1.08% and African-Americans 0.99%.

Some financial institutions are starting to fill the void with new sales initiatives. Safeco Life & Investments, for example, recently opened sales centers in minority communities in Seattle and Decatur, Ga. "This gives us a strong presence within those communities," says Pat McCormick, Safeco's senior vice president of sales and distribution.

The company has also set a goal of adding 153 agencies owned by women and minorities, and had added 59 as of the first quarter, says McCormick.

Mindy Ying, a San Marino, Calif., advisor who has been providing wealth management services to the Asian-American community the past ten years, says brokerage houses have been beefing up their marketing efforts in the community in recent years. "A friend of mine is teaching a branch manager in Chinese," she says. "From the brokerage side, everybody is jumping into this community. But on the fee-based side, it is still underserved."

Ying, who immigrated from Taiwan in 1979, says that might be due to the fact that Asian immigrants are in many cases unfamiliar with fee-based services and are not used to delegating control of their finances.

For Ying, a fee-based advisor, that has required a lot of work to educate clients about fees and fiduciary duties. Another common issue she confronts is working out a financial or estate plan that involves relatives who are non-residents, or who are living abroad. "The typical case would be the husband is in an Asian country to do business, while the wife and kids are here for education or just to live here," she says. In many cases, these families may have assets divided between different countries, Ying notes.

"It's much, much more work than it is with a typical advisor," she says. Yet Ying, who also volunteers at her church to provide services to new immigrants, finds it rewarding. "I have a passion to do this job because I normally become very, very good friends of the family," she says.

Passions sometimes run deep for advisors who consciously set out to serve communities they felt were being ignored by the financial services industry. Jerry D. Murphy of JDM Financial in Mitchellville, Md., started his firm eight years ago, a few years after working at the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) as a legal assistant.

He now has 200 clients, most of them African-American and single mothers, earning between $40,000 and $70,000 per year. His client base also includes former employees of the RTC, who like Murphy lost their jobs as the corporation was dissolved. "My vision was to primarily serve the African-American community," he says. "I kind of felt like we weren't getting adequate advice."

Much of Murphy's work consists of creating household budgets and retirement plans, evaluating insurance needs and helping clients manage their 401(k) assets. He says the initial days of his firm were difficult, consisting of monthly seminars at community centers, churches and libraries. Soon, he found that what most of his attendees were looking for was someone who didn't speak to them with Wall Street jargon.

"They wanted to feel comfortable calling you up, knowing you're not going to talk to them over their head," he says.

Luis Ortiz, a partner in Quest Financial Strategies of Chulavista, Calif., has been working with Hispanic clients since starting his career as a sales associate with PaineWebber in 1987. Most of his clients have been from Mexico, his native country.

It's a clientele, he says, that comes from a country with a history of instability in its financial institutions. That's why, he says, many of his clients used to keep their money stashed away at home rather than in a bank. "It's an education process," he says. "You have to get the trust in the system, for them to trust the system and the ways of investing."

For Ortiz, particularly early in his career, this meant that gaining clients typically has been a long process, taking months of phone calls and personal visits to homes and businesses. In some cases, the first process was getting the client's foot in the door with a simple CD account. He now has about 120 clients, about half of them Hispanic, and about $19 million under management. "It's a process, like anything else," he says.

Even when advisors have good knowledge of their clients' cultural background, there are hurdles to overcome. Daniel Yasharel, vice president of AFP Group in West Los Angeles, is a native of Iran who has been working with Iranian clients since 1987. There are times, he says, when he has difficulty selling his clients on the idea of life insurance, because in Iran the tradition is that after the death of a family member, the survivors are always cared for by other relatives.

"The idea of life insurance, even after being in the United States after 25 years, is something they're a bit uneasy with," Yasharel says. "However, people who grew up here and are in their forties or fifties, or under, are more receptive to life insurance."

Mortgages are also a more difficult concept to convey than with U.S. citizens, because so many of his clients had homes in Iran that were passed down through generations of family members.

There are other inconveniences as well. It took Yasharel months to figure out how to translate the meaning of "due diligence" to his clients. And when he's confronted with products that use baseball analogies, he's at a loss for ways to convey them to a clientele whose main sports interest is soccer. "With an American-born prospect, it is a lot easier," he says.

Yet, like other advisors serving ethnic communities, he says the rewards are lasting relationships that often cross over to a second generation of family members. Yasharel, for instance, often acts as an advisor on ancillary issues he has no direct involvement with, such as educating his clients on Social Security regulations, passing along books on sales and marketing to his business-owner clients and reviewing loan documents.

Ironically, Yasharel, who has about 130 clients and $15 million under management, didn't consciously plan to specialize in serving the Iranian community.

"You don't want to limit yourself, but that's your natural market," he says. "It keeps coming to you because of the commonality of culture."