Auburn Mountain Financial Education Services Corporation serves Financial Services Professionals and the Financial Services Industry. Our mission is to encourage, enable and empower Financial Services Professionals to help clients grow and protect their wealth. This improves the quality of life and contributes to a robust economy.
Strength and Encompassing
We wanted to provide a safe haven for career and practice management information for multicultural financial service professionals.The color “Auburn” symbolizes people of color of all nations. We did not want to use the words red, yellow, brown or black so we used Auburn as a neutral all-encompassing color. The word mountain symbolizes strength and safety.…hence the name Auburn Mountain.
Our Audience
Our services are targeted to multicultural and minority college graduates and the managers who will be hiring them. Also multicultural and minority Financial Services Professionals with several years on the job…attempting to take their practice to the next level and the managers who manage them. Mainstream candidates and professionals find our information helpful and easily accessed. Our website content really serves all Financial Services Professionals even as our target audiences are multicultural professionals.
Our experience has shown us that many minority candidates come to us unprepared and not armed with the right information to make good career decisions. We are also keenly aware that many minority candidates leave the industry prematurely because they aren’t clear about what is expected of them.
The financial industry offers incredible opportunities, particularly for minorities. We want to help set proper expectations which would nurture the passion and commitment needed to survive the first 3 years in business. What we try to do is to provide an nurturing environment for empowerment thru authoritative, non-biased financial and licensing education, career planning advice and sponsorship information. We try to remain product neutral and association neutral as we provide services to experience and inexperience Financial Services Professionals. We do this as a non-profit organization.
Donations fund our services.
Examples of Our Services
Example 1 - Coaching: Rich robust “Product Neutral” career strategies and content thru live career coaching
We commit to a 10 minute coaching call. Afterwhich we refer them to the local NAIFA or NAILBA for referral.
Series 7 or Series 6 Sponsorship seems to be a hot topic.
Example 2-Reality Check: Many young college students in their 2nd or 3rd year email us with career or job related questions about working as an advisor, claims , back office person etc. Many are from the underserved population. I believe it was Martin J. Gruenberg, FDIC Vice Chairman in the 2009 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation survey that pointed out that millions of Americans lack access to insured financial institutions. While there are few statistics available on the actual number of unbanked and underbanked individuals and households in the United States, some estimates indicate that up to 10 percent of
American families are unbanked and that a substantial share of the population may be underbanked.
Many of America’s new advisors may come from these household. Traditionally they have not had access to information they need make the right decision. To be sure they are bombarded by the nice diversity ads pumped into the communities by Financial Services and Financial Firms. It creates an interest...but how many recruiters answer a call or respond to an inquiry from certain zipcodes. They need a chance. They need good information to prepare for a solid Career in Financial Services. Our belief is that the best Financial Advisors may not all come from well to do households. Many do but not all of them. I am a testament to that as are several other directors and subject matter experts.
Opening The Playbook
So we try to service the ever-growing requests for financial services career advice with ethnic sensitivity. We try to coach them on what it means to be an advisor and arrange for a one on one reality check with an advisor. We do this thru the associations e.g.
We stay away from the discussions of specific products of companies and discussion of a particular company’s compensation.
Coaching and Listening Results….
Our payoff is the satisfactions of helping future professionals get the right information to make the right decision. The faces of America’s advisors are changing. Yet the face of its wealth remains mostly the same for the next 20 years or so. We must do a better job of setting the career expectations of multi-cultural professionals to handle mainstream wealth.
Empower and Equip
We enable aspiring Financial Services Professionals:
- with skills needed to build an honest, profitable and multicultural practic
- to appreciate the social and culture nuances that affects our ability to grow as professionals and our ability to serve the American public
- to be confident and comfortable when selected to discuss wealth transfer strategies for clients involved in intergenerational transfers