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.