International Women's Day offers an opportunity for Rowena Chan to outline how she built a disproportionately female team with intention and an eye to the future
Rowena Chan understands the fundamentally important role that women play in the future of financial advice. The President, Sun Life Financial Distributors (Canada) Inc. and Senior Vice-President, Retail Advice & Solutions leads a team of advisors with far more women than the industry average. While not at parity, Chan’s team is around 36 per cent female, as opposed to the industry average of between 15 and 20 per cent of advisors. It’s a figure that Chan is proud of, not simply as an achievement in and of itself, but because she believes it sets her team up for the future.
“Women investors play a key role in the future of wealth in Canada. By 2028, the expectation is that Canadian women will control $4 trillion in assets, up from the $2.2 trillion they control today,” Chan says. “We know that women are more likely to be recipients of a double wealth transfer, first from their parents and then from their spouses, because they have a longer life expectancy. We also know that 80 per cent of widows switch financial advisors within 18 months of their spouse passing away. Research also tells us that women investors are 2.5 times more comfortable taking investment risk when they work with a woman advisor. We know that women advisors are critical for the future of the wealth management industry.”
Chan accepts that encouraging women to take on investing requires more than just sitting them down with a female advisor. Chan notes that there are training programs and policies for all the advisors on their team to help them work with every member of a family. Chan explains that her advisors are trained to bring in more family members into the financial planning process, offering exposure to decisions that had often been the predominant domain of men in families. Having conversations about goals, dreams, and desires can prove far more engaging for the whole family than just talking about the nuts and bolts of investing.
Working specifically to connect with women investors, Chan says that the reassurances created during that planning process can be extremely important for the relationship in the long-term. She says that female clients tend to want to have a quarterback who can connect them with other resources and services. While that demand also cuts across a number of other client profiles, Chan highlights that a focus on this kind of service has helped to build connections between her team of advisors and the women they serve.
Building a disproportionately female team didn’t happen by accident. Sun Life, she says, holds events and workshops specifically designed to attract more women advisors. They hold educational workshops where female advisors can showcase their careers and how they run their practices. They give people exposure to the whole industry and highlight the path that young grads can take to financial advice. Those events also give younger women role models to look up to, which in turn can continue to bring both more women and more young people into an industry that appears to need both demographics.
Chan, of course, is one of those role models. She comes with her own lived experience as a woman leader who is now passionate about using her platform to help other women succeed. She is quick to credit her firm with enabling her success and helping her and her colleagues balance the pressures of work and family that many women face in their careers. The presence of women leaders like herself in the industry, she explains, is key to ensuring that the right decisions are made and examples are set to continue to encourage women to become advisors.
“I have had men and women leaders that believed in me before I believed in myself. They took chances on me. They gave me stretch assignments. They gave me the opportunity to grow,” says Chan. “They took risks on me, so I'm that's why I'm very determined to pay it forward.”
As the whole industry looks at Chan’s team, she hopes they understand the crucial role that diversity can play in organizational success. She stresses the importance of building a team where diversity of thought and perspective is welcomed. Each client’s needs and goals are unique, and Chan says that having unique perspectives among the advisory team can help the industry serve those clients better.
“We need diversity of thoughts and experiences to make us more innovative, more creative so that we can come up with more innovative solutions to help Canadians,” Chan says. “So I go back to how an organization can be more successful. We can always find better answers to the question of what kind of client impact can we deliver? What kind of difference can we make so that we can be more aligned to the client's needs, so that we can serve them better, regardless of their life stages? I think it all ties back to what we can do for our clients.”
