Fostering success: Wall Street Bound launches financial careers

When Wall Street Bound founder Troy Prince was growing up near Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx, The Wall Street Journal didn't deliver to his neighborhood. Once he "found the back door in" to a Wall Street career in the 1990s, he began thinking about how to gain greater representation for more Black, Latino and other minority professionals in the field, Prince said.

In his speech last week at a celebration and fundraiser (intended to be an annual event) held by Wall Street Bound — a nonprofit training, mentorship, career coaching and education organization with a mission to "help underrepresented youth achieve more" in wealth management and other financial professions — Prince pointed out that the South Bronx is only about a dozen miles from the Financial District in New York City. In some ways, though, the areas remain distant from each other.

"At some point, it started to not sit well with me, this idea that we can't find them," Prince said, referring to tired industry refrains about a lack of available talent among Black Americans, Latinos and other historically excluded groups. "It became clear that Wall Street itself didn't have the mechanisms, the will to bring this intentionality of bridging these two worlds."

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Wall Street Bound launched about five years ago at the School of Business at Medgar Evers College, a City University of New York school in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn. Since then, more than 620 undergraduate students from an array of colleges have completed its Wall Street Direct training and other programs offered by the organization, with 80% of them moving on to full-time jobs or internships at companies such as Morgan Stanley, Mizuho Bank, U.S. Bank, Empower and other big names in finance collaborating with the organization. Its partners also include Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, TIAA, New York Stock Exchange parent ICE, Nasdaq, Kaplan, the National Football League and StockTwits social media network. Financial Planning named Prince one of the "21 people who will change wealth management in 2021."

The organization held the first edition of what it aims to be a yearly fundraising and networking event at TIAA's offices in Midtown Manhattan. The occasion and Wall Street Bound's accomplishments reminded Wayne Wright, the chairman of the organization's board and the director of the technology, media and telecom team at Mizuho Securities, of a scholarship program enabling him to attend a private high school in the city that went on a field trip to the headquarters of Salomon Brothers, where he and his classmates met CEO John Gutfreund.

"It just felt like money flowing through the entire place. All I needed was one opportunity," Wright said. "The things we're doing here are changing lives. … What you're doing here is giving that level of exposure to these kids."

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Wealth management firms and professional organizations have been working in recent years to open more pathways into the field for underrepresented young people and career changers. Despite those efforts and a compelling business and moral case for expanding access to financial careers and wealth-building tools, the industry displays stark disparities. Fewer than 3% of certified financial planners are Hispanic, and fewer than 2% are Black. Changing those demographics also requires shifting the culture of an industry in which many Black, Latino and other minority professionals say they're used to being the only one in the room.

"You will come into situations in your life when you're told you're not good enough," Wright told the students in attendance at the event. "There's nothing you can't accomplish."

The participants in Wall Street Bound's programs praised how their own opinions about their potential have evolved since going through the training. Prem Sitaula, a 22-year-old student of St. Joseph's University, New York who was born and raised in Nepal, completed the organization's Wall Street Direct program earlier this year.

"The door was locked before, but we have the kind of confidence to knock on that door now," Sitaula said.

Michael Campbell, Wall Street Bound's community engagement manager, said that students who have worked with him and the organization have gone on to firms like S&P, Morgan Stanley, Mizuho, U.S. Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab.

"We're doing a good job showing our students how they can use that drive, that fire to be successful. It's more than just book study," Campbell said. "I burst with pride when I see them realize their potential and have the confidence to take that next step in their lives."

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The program has drawn many industry professionals acting as trainers and mentors to the young people, such as Mitchell Urena, an assistant vice president of private credit administration at Mizuho. Noting that he didn't have "any of the resources, any of the guidance" when he was coming into the field, he's trying to open more doors for students who have often been living in a kind of "survival mode" based on their circumstances, Urena said.

"The common denominator is tenacity and passion," he said. "There are still a lot of barriers that these communities face that are inhibiting their success. When you come from there, that's something that you have in your subconscious mind."

Wall Street Bound has set a goal "to connect 10,000 diverse youth with top-paying finance jobs" by 2030, according to its website. After an outpouring of donations and new programs in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the work of boosting representation in the industry looks different these days, according to Campbell.

"After that I was having people call me and wanting to do something," Campbell said. "That's kind of worn off, but the people who are committed are still around."