This year, because the scholarship judging panel had two ties in the selection process, the company decided to grant two extra scholarships, for a total of 14.
But the company’s outreach to the next generation of planners doesn’t stop at tuition support. TD Ameritrade’s RIA Intern Network is an online community connecting students with advisors from more than 600 firms, allowing them the opportunity to use TD Ameritrade professional development resources to create their own internship programs.
“These are small businesses and many of them didn’t know how to create an internship program,” Healy says. “We created a series of guidebooks on how to create, source and host internship programs.”
While most internship-seeking finance students are guided to internships at brokerages and wirehouses, TD Ameritrade’s program is one of the few to offer experience at an RIA, the fastest-growing sector of the financial planning industry — but that introduced a host of challenges, Healy says.
“We found that our students had peers who went to large firms with well-established internships involving classes of 10, 20 or more people,” Kate Healy says. “We wanted to create more of a sense of community and to give our advisors' interns more tools and resources, so we started doing webcasts for interns and advisors during the summer months, bringing in subject matter experts from the industry. We then expanded on that with a dedicated, closed LinkedIn group, so interns and advisors have access to a network where they can share best practices and talk to each other.”
TD Ameritrade’s internship program is unusual in that instead of providing central coordination for the interns, RIAs are free to tailor a program specific to their firm’s needs or the student’s interests.
“Historically, RIAs have been more siloed, there’s little centralization to their efforts,” Healy says. “We’re trying to bring a little bit of a central effort to make it easier for them. Each RIA forms their own relationships with universities or starts an internship program, and we give them some support.”
That support comes in the form of guidance on how to construct an effective internship, and a website to help students and firms find one another.
In 2014, TD Ameritrade extended its pipeline again with the RIA NextGen Career Exchange, a free site focused on jobs and internships in the RIA industry.
“It’s a free database where advisors can post jobs and interns can post resumes,” Healy says. “They can search and find available opportunities or candidates. Right now we have 500 participants in the exchange.”
In addition to the programs, a larger cohort of financial planning students attend TD Ameritrade’s National LINC, an annual advisor conference, to network and search for jobs. Since 2010, the company has invited students to attend the RIA conference, covering travel and hotel expenses for more than 150 students over the past six years.
“The conference overall has grown to over 3,000 people,” Healy says. “We bring students in for two reasons: one, it gives students experience with the profession, they meet advisors and form connections. Two, it does a lot towards giving advisors experience with the students. Five to ten years ago, advisors were afraid of millennials because they were so young and different. It’s as much a learning experience for advisors as it is for students.”
The company is also addressing the paucity of financial planning programs at the university level. In 2010, it launched a $50,000 grant program for schools expanding or enhancing their financial planning degree program. In 2014, TD Ameritrade added a second $25,000 grant for schools launching a new degree program.
“The schools are overjoyed,” Healy says. “This is a relatively new profession, the curricula are still evolving for these programs, so the schools themselves are playing catch-up. When colleges learn about job opportunities growing in a specific profession, however, they take notice. The growth of these programs is going to explode.”
This year, the University of North Texas received the $50,000 grant, while Temple University will use the $25,000 to create a new undergraduate degree in financial planning and to start a student chapter of the Financial Planning Association.
In addition, this year TD Ameritrade announced a strategic partnership with Texas A&M University, a 2014 recipient of the $25,000 grant. The company has agreed to become a multi-year sponsor of the new program, supporting a financial planning bachelor’s degree program, a post-graduate extended learning program leading to the CFP exam, and a new financial planning minor.