Financial Planning: “Which traits inspire trust in a financial advisor? Black or white, male or female?”
Financial Planning, Feb. 23, 2022 — Marguerita Cheng, CFP® Pro, is featured in today’s article by Justin L. Mack who writes: “When it comes to establishing trust between a financial advisor and a client, do gender and skin color matter?”
Mack explains that is the question Miranda Reiter set out to answer in a recent study analyzing the correlation between gender, race, and trustworthiness in the financial services industry.
Reiter, a CFP and assistant professor in Texas Tech University’s School of Financial Planning, said while there is a great deal of material out there supporting the notion that minority consumers hold deeper mistrust toward the financial industry than their white counterparts, information about consumers’ preferences as it specifically relates to working with a financial planner is lacking.
Marguerita Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth and a CFP Board Ambassador, said earning the trust of her clients through her hard work and credibility has always been top of mind for her.
Not only because she is a multiracial, multicultural woman working in the industry, but because she began her career as a CFP after establishing herself in another sector of the financial world.
Before becoming a financial advisor at Ameriprise Financial in 1999, she worked as an analyst and editor at Towa Securities in Tokyo, Japan. She co-founded Blue Ocean in 2013.
“As hard as it was being underrepresented — and I still feel like I’m underrepresented — imagine how it felt when I started. Having a 3-year-old and a 6-month-old. Not only is there no one else who is multiracial like me, but there’s also not anyone else who’s a mom and there’s not anyone else who is a career-changer,” Cheng said. “I sometimes would question whether or not I belong. Yes, there were people who questioned whether or not I belonged. There was an element of that, but it was also me questioning myself.”
But Cheng — daughter of a Chinese father and a mother of Eastern European and Irish descent — found ways to deeply bond with clients through the very traits that othered her in certain segments of the profession.
“There were people who would request a female CFP. Then there would be people who say ‘I want a female CFP who has kids. Or I want a female CFP who has kids and is also worried about aging parents.’ Or ‘I want a female CFP who has kids and is worried about aging parents and works with people like me.’