There’s a sobering fact I like to share with my financial professional partners to emphasize the importance of better connecting with their clients who are women. The fact: Many of their female clients will leave them soon after their husband dies.
This is based on industry research that puts the chances of a recent widow switching financial professionals as high as seven out of 10. I long assumed this jarring stat applied mainly to the men who make up about 70% of our industry—that women meshed naturally with their female clients and could teach their male colleagues to do the same.
But it turns out even many women in our field fall short when working with their own gender. I learned this from one of my fellow presenters at Financial Advisor’s annual Invest in Women conference in June, who cited eye-tracking technology that shows female professionals — like their male counterparts—focus more on the male when meeting heterosexual couples. In fact, financial professionals, regardless of gender, focus on the male 60% of the time.
“Women are intuitive,” explained Roberta Eckert, vice president of the Nationwide Retirement Institute, at the conference in Atlanta. “They pick up on that immediately. That’s why 70% of women will change advisors within one year of her husband’s death.”
Addressing The ‘Women’s Market’ Is A $10 Trillion Opportunity
Learning what experts like Eckert have to say is important to me because I’ve been passionate about helping women achieve their financial freedom since I started my career with Jackson as a wholesaler over 25 years ago. The “women’s market” has been an industry buzz term the whole time, yet it often seems scant progress has been made addressing the many challenges women face in retirement planning. We need to change this.
Although women live longer than men on average and typically have more retirement years to fund, we are less likely to receive employer-sponsored retirement benefits and half of us have no personal retirement savings in our later years. A 65-year old woman also will spend $22,000 more on healthcare in retirement, on average, than men. Amid these and many other unique financial challenges, only 15% of women have a written retirement strategy and just 42% have any retirement strategy at all.
At the same time, women’s growing financial clout may be the most important demographic trend impacting financial services. In the United States, we control more than $10 trillion in assets—and this is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. Financial professionals who don’t customize their planning approach and engage authentically with female clients are not only missing key opportunities to grow their business, but preventing more women from securing the financial freedom they deserve.
Sonny—A Financial Professional Ahead Of His Time
I often share a personal story about a financial professional named Sonny Boudreaux to show what connecting with female clients can look like. Sonny approached my mom in 1973 to discuss the importance of life insurance and disability income. I was a little girl at the time and my mom—who earned just $32,000 a year as a neurological nurse—was in the process of divorcing my dad. Keep in mind, women like my mom in the 70s couldn’t even obtain a credit card without their husband’s signature.
Sonny understood the challenges my mother faced as a single parent and called on her occasionally. He was passionate about helping others and understood the important role insurance could play in financial planning. He gave my mom all the time she needed to consider what was a major financial decision for her and she eventually purchased both insurance options. Then, just five months later, at the age of 46, my mom suffered a massive stroke.