For advisor Keith Beverly, achieving his CFP and CFA designations put him on the road to success as the owner of his own firm. Now he wants to help more Black advisors follow the same path.
Beverly has organized classes to help Black CFP aspirants study for the board’s certification exam. And he’s pushing larger wealth managers like Charles Schwab to do more to help Black RIAs than simply follow through with charitable donations the firms pledged last year after the murder of George Floyd, which sparked a nationwide wave of Black Lives Matter protests and a reckoning with inequality and racism within finance.
The RIA Beverly launched three years ago, Grid 202 Partners, has five CFPs, three CFAs and a CPA — a group that includes partner and
Beverly, 41, knows of only about 20 other Black professionals who have both the CFA and CFP marks. He feels a responsibility to push wealth management towards systemic change to bring more Black professionals into the ranks of financial advisors. That’s why he’s criticizing Charles Schwab by name and challenging the industry to go beyond donations.
“It's great that they're starting to take action now, but you also have to question, ‘Why wasn't it a priority five years ago?’” says Beverly. “Is it just symbolic, cutting a check? Or is it going to be more meaningful and substantive toward correcting some of the huge discrepancies that we see right now when it comes to advisors of color and CFPs of color in the industry?”
The numbers are stark. Even after more than 400 Black and Hispanic planners
Regardless, Beverly shares the emphasis on CFPs with Elliott, who, in 2022, will become the first Black woman ever to chair the board. Elliott joined Beverly’s practice last year. They met a decade ago, when she was working for Vanguard and he was a summer intern. Elliott leads the Washington, D.C.-based firm’s planning, while Beverly is in charge of investment management.
“When you have the CFP behind your name, it adds a level of credibility,”says Elliott, noting that the mark is especially important to planners who are Black, Latino, minorities or women trying to gain a foothold in an industry that’s predominately white men. “You have to work harder, you have to prove yourself a little bit more,” she says.
Having CFPs like Elliott on Grid 202’s team acts as an example to the industry, according to Beverly, who says he first decided to become an advisor when he was 20 years old as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University. The firm has around 100 clients and $9 million in assets under management, and Beverly’s team has also conducted 39 financial wellness seminars for large employers since 2020.
“My focus has been to grow Grid to the point where we can bring more Black CFPs in-house,” says Beverly. “It will force other companies to pay attention and to see that there's a lot of potential out there that's untapped.”
Beverly, a married father of two daughters aged 7 and 12 years old, grew up in the Northeast D.C. neighborhood of Brookland. The name of his firm alludes to the city’s area code.
He spent time working in research for Motley Fool and had been affiliated with several other RIAs in his first dozen or so years in the industry. Now, he says, he plans to be with Grid for the next two or three decades.
Despite the burden of running his RIA while working on so many other fronts, Beverly says he enjoys being an advisor so much that working on the weekends isn’t a chore. Being equipped with the CFP and CFA marks puts advisors in a very important position to find and present clients with the right solutions for the most challenging issues facing them, he says.
“I wanted to get the designations under my belt so that people respect me and I have the knowledge,” Beverly says. “It's more fun that way, but also more challenging.”
The board member of the CFP-registered academic program at North Carolina A&T State University says he finds motivation to do more than his full-time gig of running a practice in order to be an example to his children and to be true to himself and his upbringing. This drive also helps explain what prompted him to celebrate fellow Black-owned RIAs in a series of social media posts during Black History Month.
“More than anything, I wanted the industry to take notice and know that we exist,” Beverly says. “We're all working together towards something that's bigger than each of our respective firms, even though we aren't under one umbrella.”
The sense of collaboration has led to some notable results. In 2016, Beverly and CFP exam instructor Gary Clement of Clement Asset Management set a goal of training at least 20 new Black CFPs by the end of 2020 through free weekend courses. While they fell slightly below that goal, Clement and Beverly succeeded in ushering members of the next generation of planners who might otherwise have stumbled against the industry’s significant barriers to entry. In the absence of any outside support, Beverly and Clement view it as “a labor of love,” Beverly says.
To career-changer Deanda Wilson, a financial planning analyst for the Pitcairn family office, the training sessions led by Clement were the reason she was one of five students to pass the exam in November, she says. Beverly invited her to join the Saturday study group after a mutual connection introduced them last year.
“Keith is doing amazing work with just trying to be a mentor to people in this field who are up-and-coming CFPs of color,” Wilson says. “It’s a huge time commitment on their part, so I hope they can find a way to make it financially feasible to continue to do that work.”
Pushing the industry to move beyond donations
Financial committments by Schwab and other wealth managers aimed at fostering greater diversity in the industry ramped up last summer amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. Beverly calls the billions of dollars in combined contributions “a great development” that he doesn’t want to dismiss at all.
Still, he says he’s eager to see how the firms follow up on the donations by building out more structured entry routes for prospective advisors who are Black, Latino or from other minority groups. For example, he’s received messages from firms asking about partnerships with North Carolina A&T to hire students from the Historically Black College. Attracting and retaining diverse advisors is “harder work to do” than simply making a donation, Beverly points out.
It's great that they're starting to take action now, but you also have to question, 'Why wasn't it a priority five years ago?'
He’s been working on another front with Schwab through talks for Grid to join the referral program based out of its brokerage branches, Schwab Advisor Network. Fewer than 2% of the RIAs using the firm as their custodian receive clients through the program, which requires participants to have at least $250 million in assets under management, according to Schwab.
“The referral service is designed for clients with complex financial situations or specialized asset management needs,” spokeswoman Meredith Richard said in an emailed statement. “Our research suggests that firms of that size will have the resources to meet the legal and compliance requirements we must put in place to ensure a high-quality experience for end clients and advisors alike.”
Richard notes that Schwab includes firms of all sizes in its “Find Your Independent Advisor” directory and features the stories of firms led by minority and women advisors in ad campaigns. The firm launched a scholarship
On the other hand, the minimum AUM for referrals rules out “the vast majority” of Black-owned firms, Beverly points out. He says he understands large firms can accommodate more clients, but he says that smaller and younger firms often have the room to grow. The program is “anti-capitalist” in that Schwab, rather than the clients, is choosing the RIA, Beverly says.
“They'd be able to allow us or any other firm on the platform if they were so inclined,” he says. “I look at it as distorting the market to some extent, because you're giving the larger players more advantages in the marketplace.”
