When Lindsay Hans was about 7 years old, she would stand by the screen door in her home in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and see her father — a financial advisor — off to work in the morning. As he left, he'd turn around and say: "Lindsay, tell me to make money."
"Make money," she'd reply.
For Hans, now president and co-head of Merrill Wealth Management, money was a comfortable topic of discussion as a child with both her father and her mother, who balanced the family's checkbook with Wite-Out and clipped coupons every Sunday.
"We talked about money a lot," Hans said of herself and her parents, William DeNardo, now deceased, and Lynn DeNardo. Those discussions and being familiar with the work of a financial advisor from a young age set her on a career path that other people may not have been able to see for themselves, she said. About 10 years ago, she realized that her good fortune with her career came with a responsibility.
"Did I end up in this field because I had exposure to it early, by luck and chance?" she asked. "If that's the case, then my responsibility is to pay it forward and create pathways for people who may not be so lucky."
"I've got to play my part at changing the demographics of this industry," Hans said. "It shouldn't be random to come into this. It should be more systematic. It should be more known. And that motivates me every day."
Hans, with Merrill Wealth co-head Eric Schimpf, oversees more than 25,000 employees who provide wealth management advice to U.S. individuals and businesses with $3.4 trillion in client balances, which includes assets under management and deposits held at the firm. Merrill added a record 37,500 net new clients in 2023, up nearly 50% from 2022, and added $38 billion AUM from clients in 2023, nearly five times its AUM increase in 2022.
When it comes to attracting a more diverse pool of talent for financial advisor positions, recruiting has been hampered by common misconceptions about the work, Hans said. That means there's an opportunity for increasing awareness and education to potential recruits about how the industry has evolved, she said.
"There's still talent that maybe hasn't had exposure to this business that can think of this as just a business of stockbrokers," Hans said. They may feel that they don't want to join a profession that only sells or recommends stocks or works for commissions, she explained. "The reality for most advisors is that's not the way their business operates."
When prospects for a wealth management career hear about the actual work of a financial advisor — about sitting down with clients and listening to find out what matters most to them and their families, their worries, what they want to achieve in life, and what they want for their legacies, and then mapping out financial strategies for those issues based on best guidance — they see the profession in a different light, Hans said.
"When we talk like that, which is the reality of what we do for clients, prospective talent often says: 'Yeah, that's what I want to do. That aligns with my values. That's interesting to me. That's not what I thought.'"
When she talks to women who are considering financial advisor or leadership roles, the hurdle can be self-confidence. Hans said she often hears self-doubt creeping into their thoughts even before they've fully assessed their potential for the job. They wonder "is it really worth the trade-offs," she said, or rationalize "I might be OK where I am" or "I don't know if it's ultimately worth the next level."
But those doubts tend to dissipate once the discussion turns to the more practical considerations of taking a bigger job and thinking through, for example, how they can make a new position work for both themselves and their families, Hans said. "It's very important that we have those types of conversations."
Overall, the industry needs to invest in attracting new talent "that historically has not made it its first choice," she said. "The industry has a demographic issue with low representation across different gender and ethnic groups."
At Merrill, "we believe it's important to more closely reflect the clients, the communities that we serve and that we wish to continue to serve," Hans said. "The pace of change of who holds the wealth today has moved quite fast, and the industry lagged behind that from a talent perspective. So the industry has a lot of work to do, to really think about how we educate talent about wealth management."
