After a change in leadership earlier this year, the Association of African American Financial Advisors removed the "interim" label from the chair of its board.
Last month, the board appointed Alex David its permanent chair leading the group of more than 2,000 members alongside CEO Sheena Gray.
Gray and David took the posts
David is an industry veteran of roughly three decades who's currently the division director of the northeast
He recently spoke with FP Chief Correspondent Tobias Salinger about what leads firms and professionals of all backgrounds to get involved with the work of Quad-A, why its work directly affects the racial wealth gap and how it aims to advance that work in 2025.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Financial Planning: The Board of Quad-A removed the interim label from your role as chair recently. What made you interested in being the chair of Quad-A, and what was your case for becoming the chair on a full-time basis?
Alex David: I've always had an interest in all things diversity. And so if you look at my past, and we're going back 20 years even from my stint at Lord Abbett, where I was head of diversity education, and even when I worked at the New York City Bar Association for a little while as an economist, but also the head of research and diversity.
We're talking decades-long interest in this content around diversity. And clearly, as an African American growing up in this profession — and the fact that I was a financial advisor and struggled with some of the challenges that I see some advisors struggling with now, still.
I've always had this passion around trying to help, trying to move the ball forward, trying to help others who were willing to be helped — whether it's coaching advisors, mentoring advisors or other professionals in the business, and even coaching and working with organizations that have a real desire to lean into diversity, specifically around African American advisors and professionals. And so being a part of Quad-A is just a natural fit. This is exactly what LeCount Davis had in mind
FP: The sponsors of Quad-A include some of the largest firms in investing, wealth management and insurance. What drives some of the biggest firms in the industry to get involved with Quad-A, and how can more financial advisors and wealth management firms join in its efforts?
AD: I'll start with the organizations themselves. I think there's almost two different sleeves of organizations. They're the very, very large ones that we all know well, Merrill, Morgan, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and so forth. These firms have rather robust organizations within the organization that support diversity, support diverse advisors, and they've got some great programs, and for what they tell us is their opportunity to partner with us. We can help them get more African American students into the industry. It's a really big part of their individual initiatives, and so they're leaning on us to help out with that, and that's one of our objectives, as well as helping their own advisors to continue to develop tools and networks and collaboration, not only across their own firms, but across the industry.
And then, by extension, you have African American professionals that are not advisors. Perhaps they're in supervision or compliance or back office, giving them this opportunity to collaborate and network across, again, not only their own firms, but also the industry. So that's what we have seen from larger firms.
From smaller firms that really do not have a robust department, they may barely even have a head of diversity, quite frankly, and they have a dearth of financial advisors who are African American descent. What we have provided that type of partnership is, we almost act as their diversity department — meaning providing programs, resources, tools, networking, collaborations, articles, studies that they can use to help their own African American advisors, whether it's five or 10 of them, as well as help them gain more African American advisors in their shops. And so the partners are kind of using us and utilizing us in different ways, depending on how far they are down the path in their own institutional journeys.
FP: A recent report by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College on what it called the "racial will gap" found that eliminating the gap between Black households and white households in just having a will
AD: Many African American households are gaining in income and are very quickly moving into the middle class, upper middle class, and they've reached a level of income in their lives where they paid for college. They've sent their kids to college. They're on the path to the American dream. And so now it's about investing in many of them. The only investing that has been done is really through a 401(k), right? And so I think the will is more around, do they have the intestinal fortitude and the courage and the lack of intimidation to step into an office, an investment firm's office, and engage in a conversation of, 'Hey, I'd like to start investing.'
What I have found is oftentimes these families believe that they're too small to start, so it's this conundrum, and it's sad. It's like, "Well, I don't have enough money, and so I can't start investing." And it's like, but if you don't start investing, you won't have enough money. It's almost like going to the gym is like, "Well, I really want to lose weight, but I'm intimidated to go to the gym." If you don't go to the gym, you're not going to lose weight. And it's a very similar pattern of what I've observed anecdotally.
And so I think this is a culmination of a number of socioeconomic factors that go into starting a conversation. And I do believe that Quad-A can fit into an interesting gap, because oftentimes, if I'm from a foreign country, and I come to the United States, I often feel comfortable with people that are from my own country. It's just a natural social fit.
I think the same is true with the African American experience as well. Oftentimes they feel comfortable having a conversation with someone that might have experienced the same thing that they have. "I finally am at a place in my life where I can start saving and investing. I want to learn more. I'd like to start investing. Oh, you're the same way, you're first generation. Wow, I don't feel as intimidated. So starting with $25,000, that's all right."
Being able to have a comfortable conversation with like-minded and perhaps like-history individuals oftentimes needs to take place. Quad-A is the largest organization, and maybe the only retail investment-focused organization, that provides that demographic, whereby anyone can go to the site and tap and say, "Hey, I'd like to
FP: What else should financial advisors and wealth management professionals know about the work of Quad-A and your role as the chair of the board?
AD: Under the leadership of Sheena Gray,
A couple of things happened under her leadership. iWe had
In addition, we also have what we call these meetups in different cities all around the country where firms can partner with us to help their own advisors, as well as students and others, meet up and connect and collaborate and network.
And then last but not least, we're really leaning into what we can do to help the students who may have been intimidated by coming into this business. Many times they don't quite understand our business. Perhaps the only thing that they're thinking is, "Well, this is a business where it's variable income, and I'm coming out of college and I've got a lot of student loans, and I need to go work at Google and have a salary," not realizing the great benefits that they can deliver to their community, but also make a very good living.
We've been working with a number of institutions, particularly HBCUs, but also others, in augmenting the SIE program so that the students, while they're students, can actually get on the path to be licensed. And if they've gone down that path, then maybe we can connect them with some of our partner firms that allow them to become paid interns, and then perhaps work in the branches or maybe even back office. And so we're creating an ecosystem trying to get people into the business, help them along their careers and provide business development opportunities for advisors.
Because, again, any person can go and say, "Hey, I'd like to find an African American advisor." And then, if some would like to stay down that path, perhaps giving them coaching or buying books of business and informing teams and best practices around that, or maybe they'd like to go into the executive ranks, leading a branch or back office. And so there's those opportunities as well. I think we aspire to really act as the nucleus of the industry as it relates to all things African American, whether it's the student or the professional, where they can come to us as a resource and we provide assistance.
But those four items that I mentioned before, the women's conference, the Vision conference, the meetups and the work that we're doing with the students are our four key pieces in terms of events.
The last thing I'll mention, and this will be new: We've had an opportunity to partner with another organization, the Financial Services Institute. This is an organization that really serves independent advisors, but we partnered with them on Capitol Hill Day last September. We had an opportunity to advocate along with FSI, but in 2025 we're actually looking to have our own Capitol Hill Day, bringing a number of African American advisors and those in the industry to advocate on specific ideas and initiatives that our elected officials need to know about as they do their regulating and their lawmaking. And so we're looking forward to building that out. It's in its skeleton phase. Now we don't quite know when we'll do it, but we do have partner firms that are willing to assist and partner with us and allow us to use their resources. So we're excited about that as well.
