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July 10, 2019 at 04:09 PM
As part of an initiative intended to encourage more women to enter the asset management sector, United Capital Financial Advisors is partnering for the first time with the nonprofit organization Girls Who Invest (GWI).
Through the partnership, United Capital opened its doors to two college students for a six-week paid internship that started July 8 at its Atlanta and Dallas offices as part of GWI’s Summer Intensive Program, the organizations said Wednesday. The four-week, on-campus internship was designed to provide students with hands-on experience in important financial concepts including capital asset pricing models, financial statement analysis, risk and return, the time value of money and valuation, they said.
GWI’s summer program “aligns with United Capital’s longstanding goals of bringing more voices into financial life management, whether by engaging all members of client households with gamified tools” that include MoneyMind and HonestConversations, or “empowering female career leadership and mentorship at all levels within” the United Capital team, the firm said in a statement.
This marks the first time at the enterprise level in which United Capital has partnered with an organization that caters to women in the industry, Kara Murphy, chief investment officer at United Capital and a chartered financial analyst, told ThinkAdvisor.
But United Capital “relaunched its Women’s Initiative in September 2018, and partnering with Girls Who Invest was the next step in the evolution in supporting women in the financial services and investment management industry,” she pointed out.
United Capital believes “all investors should feel more comfortable talking about their money and financial life goals,” she told ThinkAdvisor. After all, “our industry is rife with stories of male advisors focusing on market returns and projected balances,” she said.
However, she added: “Most women I’ve engaged with have much more financial life-oriented questions, like, ‘Will I be OK?’ [or] ‘Who will care for me if and when I am alone?’ It’s been shown time and time again that a broader, more diverse set of voices in an industry leads to better outcomes. So by having more women in investing roles, the industry itself will also benefit.”
