Penny Pennington has been managing partner at Edward Jones since 2019, and is the first woman to hold that position in the company. During her tenure thus far, she has led the St. Louis, Missouri-based financial services firm through a pandemic, navigated a volatile stock market and weathered a regional banking crisis.
But along with the challenges, the firm, which has nearly $1.8 trillion in assets under management, has also had a strong 2023, reporting a net revenue of $3.37 billion in the second quarter, up 12% year-over-year, as well as a 1% bump in advisor headcount, to nearly 19,000 across the U.S. and Canada.
And in August, Edward Jones announced a strategic partnership with Citigroup to provide checking and savings accounts to Edward Jones clients.The deal could eventually include other retail banking services, such as securities-based lending.
But as Pennington sees it, it's during the more challenging times that the firm's advisors can be most crucial to its nearly 8 million clients, helping to calm their anxieties, answer their questions and keep them on the right path.
"We work really hard to keep our clients focused on their long-term goals and make sense of … things like inflation, which is a new thing after 40 years," she said. "The impact [inflation] is having on our clients and the goals that they're setting is very real for them."
This spring's regional banking crisis also set clients on edge, she said, although her view is that this was largely a localized, rather than systemic, issue.
"The interest in CDs and parking money and cash was quite elevated during that period of time, especially … when you can get 4 and 5% on your cash," she said.
Again, she noted, the goal is to keep clients focused on their long-term plans while also giving them an understanding of how headline-generating events can affect their portfolios in the short term.
Pennington has been with Edward Jones since 2000. She has held such positions as financial advisor; principal, branch and region development and principal, client strategies group before being named managing partner. Prior to joining Edward Jones, she served as a managing director of corporate and investment banking at Comerica Bank for nearly four years, and was a senior vice president of corporate and investment banking at Wachovia Bank of Georgia for 12 years.
Pennington, like many other industry leaders, is currently dealing with the transformative force that generative artificial intelligence is having on financial services.
Edward Jones is on a "learning journey" regarding AI, she said, with several projects in the works to help employees and advisors learn how to use AI to help them to work more efficiently and effectively.
"We say that human financial advisors will not be replaced by AI, but human financial advisors with AI will replace human financial advisors who are not leveraging and capitalizing on things that make insights and data more efficiently available in order to provide more insights for those clients," Pennington said.
Pennington's dedication to the industry extends outside of her role at Edward Jones. In 2022, she was elected to serve a three-year term as a large-firm governor of the FINRA board of governors. She also serves on the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Donald Danford Plant Science Center and Washington University in St. Louis.
She is currently on the six-member search committee for the new St. Louis-Fed president, following the July announcement that long-time president James Bullard was stepping down.
