A raft of reports on International Women's Day shows what is at stake for the wealth management sector and what are the winnings from putting women's interests at the centre of strategy.

International Women’s Day, as held today, is a chance to reflect on how far women have come in entering once male-dominated fields such as finance and politics and also an opportunity to evaluate what progress still needs to be made, not least in wealth management. 

With the world’s largest wealth manager, UBS, recently announcing a marketing campaign with a  focus on women, and various reports and surveys from State Street Global Advisors, PricewaterhouseCoopers and EY pointing to how the sector is missing a trick in not understanding women’s needs sufficiently, it is clear that there is a lot more that smart business owners should do. Simple financial self-interest and the profit motive, never mind anything more high-minded than this, suggests as much. (To view the EY report for example, click here.)

Your correspondent was reminded of the importance of advancing the interests of women when, last October in London, he joined members of Pink Shoe - a network of women in business - and the Enterprise Research Centre for a conference at the Shard skyscraper, a suitabily awe-inspring setting. Members discussed how to harness female talent to drive economic growth. (It is noteworthy that UK Prime Minister Theresa May is patron of the Pink Shoe organisation and an exemplar of women reaching the highest office, such as her predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, or Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany.) A statistic that caught the eye at the October meeting was that only 20 per cent of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the UK are women-owned, out of a population with a 51 per cent female majority. It was also pointed out by Caroline Dinenge, the minister for women and equalities in the UK, that women-owned firms inject around £115 billion ($139.9 billion) into the UK economy. (Britain has been ranked as the best place in Europe for female entrepreneurs.) 

While one might be wary of government programmes in various countries to achieve certain objectives (beware the Law of Unintended Consequences), such a focus on encouraging more women to enter certain professions certainly makes sense given demography and patterns of a wealth ownership. There appears to be plenty of corporate and government appetite in the UK and certain other jurisdictions. The Pink Shoe organisation mentioned above, for example, is developing a UK Economic Blueprint for Women alongside corporate partners and other organisations such as the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC), WEConnect International and the Federation of Small Businesses. It has strong support from Ministers, MPs and Peers [House of Lords] and All-Party groups.

That there is work to do was shown, for example today in a report here showing more than two-thirds of female investors surveyed by EY say their private banker or wealth manager does not understand their goals - a finding that might go some way to explaining why businesses fall short in increasing their share of wallet.

The stakes are high. According to a report last year by the UK’s Wealth Management Assocation, which cited data from the CFA Institute, the global income of women will grow from $13 trillion to $18 trillion in the next five years, exceeding the GDP growth of China and India combined during the same period. By 2028, women will control 75 per cent of the discretionary spending around the world. In short, women have serious financial firepower.

There are, it must be said, high-profile women at the helm in certain wealth management organisations – one thinks of Tan Su Shan, managing director and group head, consumer banking group and wealth management at DBS, one of the “Big Three” Singapore-headquartered banks, or Liz Field, who heads the UK’s Wealth Management Association, or Nancy Curtin, chief investment officer at Close Brothers Asset Management, and Maria Elena Lagomasino, CEO and managing partner at WE Family Offices, based in New York (a firm recently honoured with an award from Family Wealth Report, sister news service to this one). Even so, this remains, at least from your correspondent’s own experience as a financial journalist of more than 25 years, a male-dominated profession.

Nevertheless, there appears to be a shift under way and it is encouraging to see the big guns making a noise: UBS this week announced a new branding campaign with a focus on women. A report by that bank in 2015, produced in association with PricewaterhouseCoopers, showed that the world’s female billionaire population, for example, has risen at a faster pace than for men. And yet the share of wallet in some wealth management markets, among men and women, can be difficult to shift. In the UK, for example, Scorpio Partnership, the consultancy, has estimated that this share is stuck around the 40 per cent mark. 

In another report today by PwC, entitled Winning the fight for female talent: How to gain the diversity edge through inclusive recruitment, it looked at what employers can do to attract and retain female talent and underscored the importance of embedding diversity and inclusion into the employer brand. The organisation surveyed 4,792 professionals (3,934 women, 845 men) with recent experience of the jobs market from 70 countries and from different organisations to find out about their career aspirations and employer diversity experiences and expectations. In parallel, PwC surveyed 328 executives with responsibility for diversity or recruitment strategies in their respective organisations to explore current diversity trends and practices within employer attraction and selection activities. 

In this case, female and male respondents ranked opportunities for career progression among the top three employer traits, along with competitive wages and flexible work arrangements. Female career starters and female millennials identified this as the most attractive employer trait, as did women overall in Brazil, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa and the UAE. The report also found that women who had recently changed employers said a lack of opportunities for career progression was the top reason they left their former employer (35 per cent).

It is important that the wealth management industry treats empowerment of women in the workforce, and outreach to women as clients, not as virtue-signalling exercises, but central objectives of strategy. Clearly, cultural sensitivities must be considered - one should not assume that all regions of the world are filled with people who regard equality before the law as a self-evident fact. (A sober thought in the second decade of the 21st Century.) 

As we are seeing in areas such as impact investing, corporate governance and other movements, opening the doors for women isn’t just the right thing to do, it is the wise course financially.