A brief stint at Publishers Clearing House paved the path to finance for Racquel Oden.
She graduated in 1994 from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with a degree in political science, and was hired into the publishing company's management trainee program. Managing hundreds of employees in its mail room made Oden realize that she enjoyed being a leader.
She went back to school and got an MBA from Hampton University, a private, historically black institution in Virginia. Upon graduation, she was hired as an equity trading associate at Morgan Stanley. "What was great about Morgan Stanley at that time, was they had this equity trading program, so if you were going to be a trader on the desk, they made you go from the back office to the front office," she recalled. "So I went from the operations team to the technology team and then onto a trading desk."
Oden credits the experience for having a big impact on her career. "It gave me a front to back view on decision making, how each part of the equation impacts the other. It taught me how to think holistically," she said.
At the time, trades were being conducted over the phone and recorded manually on pink sheets of paper. Meanwhile, the internet was beginning to gain traction in other industries and companies. "We were financial services and we're the last to adopt anything. But I was like, this internet thing is really going to change this business and we are clearly going to be left behind," she said.
Oden decided to go back to school and get a degree in coding. "What it meant was that I knew how to build a web page and how to build a website, and back then that was a big deal," she recalled. She approached the head of the equity division and told them that she would like to transition to the internet team, which at the time was called "marketing technology." His response was that she was hired to be in the trading program and that's where she would stay.
But she wasn't convinced by his reasoning." I already knew how to do the trading piece, and I knew this internet thing can be a big thing," Oden said. And at that time, she was a rare combination of someone who held an MBA, was a trader, understood equities, understood the internet and could code. As a result, Paine Webber recruited Oden in 1999 to run its internet strategy. (Paine Webber was acquired by UBS the following year.)
Oden's first task was to build an internet interface for clients. "This was a very big paradigm shift in the industry — in wealth management — the belief that clients could log in, see the price of a stock and see how their portfolio is doing. And so here I am at Paine Webber, which is one of the larger brokerage houses, and I'm being asked to build this alternative strategy concept that is potentially very much in conflict with what everyone else did there every single day," she explained.
She was also tasked with revamping the interface and workflow for the brokers. That was how Oden learned the wealth management business without actually working as an advisor.
Her work caught the attention of the president of Paine Webber — the corporate name wasn't officially dropped by UBS until 2003 — and she became his chief of staff from 2002 through 2004. "I got to see everything from HR to operations, to sales, to fixed income in this job. And my job is to not only support the president, but also support the initiatives across all these teams. At this level, I saw things I never had the opportunity to see before," Oden said.
Oden internalized all that collective knowledge and spent the next six years rising up through the ranks at UBS. She spent her last two years there as the head of internal products sales before she was approached by Merrill Lynch Wealth Management in 2010 to be its head of advisor strategy and development.
"I was the first hire under
At that time, the Department of Labor issued a new regulation, the "fiduciary rule," that required brokers to have a fiduciary responsibility to every customer, Oden said. "This was not part of the regulation when I started in the business, and so I ended up running what they called 'advisor strategy.' It was my job to figure out how 14,000 advisors were going to make the shift from brokers to advisors, which was a massive behavior change."
In 2018, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon tapped Oden to head the Northeast division of the bank's wealth management franchise. At the time, the retail and consumer business were integrated, and the bank wanted to grow its wealth franchise. "I had already worked in investment banking, wealth management, asset management, product strategy, but I'd never been in the retail business before, so I figured this would be the rounding out piece," Oden said.
She spent two and a half years building out the Northeast division, and then one and a half years as the head of national sales, and then her last nearly two years at JPMorgan as its head of consumer bank network expansion. "What was great about JP is that it gave me scale on a level I'd never dealt with before. I thought I understood scale working at Merrill, with 14,000 and UBS, with 6,000 advisors. But there I was dealing with 50,000 people. And so whatever decisions you make, the impact on people is magnified," Oden explained.
In December of 2023,
"They were going to create a single, client-centric organization that would go from a retail premier customer, which meant you had some level of affluence, to ultra-high worth customers. So all of the products would sit under this organization — retail products, asset manager products, investment products and corporate products. So if you think about it, this is every single thing that I've done. And it all culminated into this one job that didn't exist anywhere else," Oden said.
How to get more minorities into the industry
Oden sits on the board of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which is focused on public historically black colleges across the U.S., and ensuring that these schools are plugged into corporate recruiting. "And so the question is, are we targeting the right institutions to at least start early career interventions? You can't keep doing what you're doing and get different outcomes," she said.
Banks also need to take a hard look at their programs and how they are structured, she added. She used her early days at Merrill Lynch as an example. "We didn't have ways for non-rainmakers — people who don't walk in with a Rolodex of million-dollar clients — to be hired. And that raised a barrier for women and minorities," she said.
One of the ways Oden leveled the playing field was a concept she called "teaming." "If I look at these individuals who have these amazing Rolodexes, they're not really good at portfolio management. So I would team them with a woman who was really good at planning, and she would eventually get her certification and would deliver all of the financial plans for the practice. And then they would eventually learn the business and take it over one day," she explained.
Not only did this help get more minorities and women into financial planning, it also solved a looming succession problem. At the time, the average age of a Merrill Lynch advisor was 60, and the company would face a glut of experienced advisors in less than a decade. (Average advisor age across the industry today: 59.)
"We used teaming as a way to solve the longevity issue of the organization as well as to diversify the talent we were bringing in," she said.
She's bringing the same concept to
Oden thinks there's a lot of opportunity for these types of programs at banks to get more diverse and younger candidates into their organizations. "You know what the clients you're going to be serving look like. It's going to be the most diverse population in history, and you always want to be thinking ahead about what's next and how you are going to meet clients' needs," she said.
Best advice for someone starting out in the industry
Oden said people should decide first if the industry is right for them. "Not the company, not the job, but the actual industry, because you can't change that. So if you really don't like finance or if sitting in front of individual clients gives you anxiety, it's not the right industry for you," she said.
Next, she advises a new joiner to focus on building their technical skills. "At the beginning, your technical skills will build the base of what your value [to the company] will be. You will be providing research, data and analysis for the people who make the really big decisions," she said. But she also cautions against relying too heavily on data. "You're in a generation that all of our companies are trying to figure out. So provide that context with confidence, even if they don't immediately take it in."
And it's important to be comfortable taking risks. "The only real risk is if you have no aptitude or the skill set to do the job or if you're afraid to try something different," Oden said. Risk-taking "should be slightly uncomfortable — more like butterflies than a pit in your stomach. If it's completely uncomfortable, you've gone too far outside your zone."
Finally, Oden said having a sponsor can have a tremendous impact on the course of one's career. "Sponsors are critical. Try to make sure it's someone within your organization. The intent of sponsorship is having a person who can advocate for you when you're not in the room. They're the ones that will say he or she's the right person for that next job. And you may never hear about any of those conversations, because that's a true sponsor."
