Krawcheck’s work has allowed her to be a pioneer in many respects, not just as a woman in a world dominated by men. She has been widely published in both social and traditional media, with articles focusing on Wall Street regulatory reform, and she is also advising a number of start-up firms.
At Bernstein, she earned a reputation for giving impartial advice and bucking trends, if necessary. When she decided to take the company out of the lucrative, but conflicted, underwriting business, Fortune magazine called her “the last honest analyst.”
Citigroup later chose her to deal with criticisms of conflicts of interest within its wealth management and research business after charges were brought against the company by former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Krawcheck was put in charge of the 13,000 brokers and analysts in the new retail brokerage unit, Smith Barney, set up to separate Citigroup’s investment banking from its stock brokering and research operations to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in those areas.
Krawcheck earned more accolades after she was named CEO of the Smith Barney unit, for which she was named to Time magazine’s 2002 list of Global Influentials and Fortune’s list of the most influential people under the age of 40.
After Citigroup’s private bank had been banned from doing business in Japan for conflicts with its sales practices, Krawcheck helped tackle the problem by working on changing the corporate culture for Smith Barney’s financial advisors as an early advocate of a fiduciary standard for the brokerage industry.
She went on to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch to head its new wealth management division in 2009. She led the unit to $3.1 billion in profits during her two years there.
Glass Ceilings
As Krawcheck advanced in her career, she saw that women were getting short shrift from the male advisors who dominated the industry. “I saw the industry not doing a good job for women,” she says. “You only have to go back a few years to find a time when the financial industry saw women as a niche market.”
She wanted to change that situation. Because she could not interest financial services corporations in starting a service catering specifically to women investors, she started her own. In 2016, she co-founded Ellevest, launching the firm after doing extensive work with women investors (and potential women investors) to see what they wanted out of a digital platform.
Ellevest was designed to close the investment gap between men and women. It has a diverse workforce as well. The staff is 60% female and 40% people of color.