Rebecca Williams, divisional lead for an FTSE 250-listed company, shares her journey from an accidental entry into financial services to becoming a champion for women in wealth management.  She explores the urgent need for diversity in leadership, the evolving role of female clients, and how technology can support, but not replace, human connection in financial planning.  A compelling conversation on influence, inclusion, and the future of the industry.

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and as ever, the wonderful Jonny Adams. And today we're joined by Rebecca Williams, divisional lead for financial planning at Rathbones. So Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It's lovely to have you.

It's great to be here. Thanks.

We're really excited to unpack a couple of key topics with you in today's episode, and really it's going to be focused largely on on women in this industry and and female clients in the wealth space. We're really, really looking forward to unpacking that, and also, as we think about that, what the future of leadership looks like in in wealth management in general. But again, thinking about that and the context of women in leadership as well. So as is customary on the growth workshop podcast, was like to start with that first question, if you could have three people on your personal board of advisors, who would they be and why?

That is a great question, I would definitely have my mentor. So Roger Clark, who was my manager too many years ago to really remember when I worked at sea. Horrify met Roger. He led the team there, the professional services team. I was para planner at the time. We started working together more and more. When he left, I went to follow him and worked in his team there. And then, when he retired a few years ago at brownship Lee, I led the team. So I took his I took his role, which is fantastic, and he still mentors me. Now, he's absolutely amazing. We meet up quite regularly, and just such sage advice, and he's just a fantastic leader. So he would be absolutely ahead of the table. My second one is a bit of a wild card. Would would be Wonder Woman.

We're going to allow it.

I think, yeah. And for the audience's benefit, he might be going, Matt, you change the rules every time we do this. You ask this question. But I think, I think there's a really good reason why. So Rebecca, tell us why.

I can explain, so my other half is very big fan of DC and Marvel. So I've had a diet of that quite steadily for the last few years. But when I've got my kind of first big leadership role at brownship, Lee, he bought me a little Wonder Woman doll for my desk, so she sits on my desk at home.

What does she help you with? Like, what do you when do you look at that character on your desk? And what does it help you? What does it help you do?

I think it just helps remind me that I can do difficult things. I think we all struggle with things like imposter syndrome. It gets bandied around quite a lot of confidence. Or sometimes I think, well, do I deserve to be here? I look at Wonder Woman and just think, well, yeah, actually, I've done some quite decent things in my career. I've come quite a long way. So just gives you a bit it just gives me a bit of reassurance, really. And Matt is my biggest supporter. When we worked together during covid, we were in the same in the same room, and he was kind of the desk behind me. He used to kind of sometimes hear calls that I was making, and every now and then, he just kind of wheel over or leave me a post it note and saying, Wow, you were just amazing on that call. I'm so proud of you. It was just really lovely. So maybe he should be spot three. He's a good cheerleader.

He's a good cheerleader. I love that that's made I love that though. I think that's great, and it's great to have people like that in your corner. And Rebecca, you talk about those successes in your career, and you've had an illustrious career so far. Talk to us a little bit about your journey, like, where did it all start out? And how did you get to where you are today?

Well, by accident. I think there's quite a lot of people end up in financial services by accident. So I'm a history geek at heart. I did that at uni, looked at various history careers, more academia, and just thought, probably not. That's not for me. And joined a graduate scheme in Marsh at Marsh McLennan. So that was like in the millennium. So I was showing how old I am now. And that was a big risk broking company, but they had a financial services department, which was where I was put at the time. I thought, well, this is a bit unfair. No trip to Lloyd's of London for me. None of these, you know, exciting kind of nights out in the city. I was made redundant from there after a couple of years, because they got into some quite it got into a bit of difficulty, but by that point, I'd already done my advanced financial planning certificate, and the rest is history, really. So I started out as a para planner. I did have a foray into advising in between, and I

started doing advice on defined benefit transfers. So it was like right in at the deep end. It was around that time that I met Matt, so we went traveling for 12 months and just said, bye, bye. And then when I came back, got another power planning role. It was shortly after that that I started working with Roger at the bank, and it was really his support that gave me the confidence to move back into advising again. So by the time I left Seah and CO, I was a financial planner. Loved being a para planner, though. I mean, I go back to doing that tomorrow if I if I needed to, because it was fantastic. And I just think you can't rate paraplanners and admin support highly enough to be a good FP, it's as much about the team behind you as it is about what you do. They're fantastic. Stepped into management at Brown Shipley, so started leading the London team, started leading the London team there, with Roger supporting me again, and then when he retired, took over looking after the

whole of the team across the country. Then I joined Rathbones as a manager so, and that has been really exciting. And we. We just they bought Saunders and house, so we had that integration going on. Then, of course, we've merged with investex, or that's going on. So from a leadership and management point of view, just huge amounts going on. I feel like I'm only kind of halfway through, which is crazy, really, isn't it? But if I think about where I was 20 years ago, just starting out as a power plant and taking exams with another 20 years, it could be all kinds of things waiting for me. So it's quite exciting, really. And I feel now I'm just kind of getting to that point where I've got, like, a more of a leadership platform, and I can start having a bit more influence and starting to, you know, help others with their journeys too, which is great.

So if we sort of think about that journey, and you talk about the impact or the potential impact, obviously it's really important to be aware of, like, what's sort of coming, or what we foresee might be coming down the road. Of course, no one could predict the future, but you know, what do you see as the future of wealth management? It's a big question. But like, what do you see as the sort of, where do you see the kind of priorities in this industry.

I think one of the big priorities for the industry, and one of the big challenges for the industry, is around diversity. To be successful, you like to see people that look like you doing those roles, whether that's, you know, from a female point of view, or a race point of view, or social, you know, economic background. You want to see a variety of people in those roles. It makes it feel more accessible. Where I feel particularly passionate is seeing more women in these roles, particularly in the leadership roles. So still very thin on the ground when it comes to females in senior positions, which is a massive challenge for the industry, because women bring so much to these leadership roles and to all the roles you know, all the way through, from Admin up to financial planners. So you've got 18% of financial planners are women. At the moment, it's less than a fifth. I mean, that's not great, is it? We really need to work on that, and that has changed a

little bit since I've been in the industry, but not it's not changing quick enough. But you know, there is a challenge with women in senior positions. You can't just magic them out of thin air. So I think you really have to start at the bottom, and you can see a lot more women coming into the profession. So we can see, you know, there's a lot more female paraplanners. They want to move up. We promoted four of our para planners last year at rathbones, and three of those ladies, which is brilliant. They're all absolutely fantastic. They're going to make amazing advisors. Well, they're already amazing advisors. So I think focusing on you've got to focus on the kind of the people coming up through the industry and really encouraging them to see that they can do this job. And it's a fantastic career, like it's a fantastic career for anyone being a financial planner, especially, I think fantastic for women. I have I had a really good experience when I had my

daughter, I was able to come back to work flexibly. So until she was school age, I just did four days a week. Now with we couldn't work at home then, but now, with the advent of working at home as well, it makes it much easier for parents. You see a lot of guys in the office as well who are fully engaged with school runs and pickups and all kinds of things, which is brilliant. It is becoming a lot more accessible. It's a really flexible career, and it's pretty well paid, too. So I think there's loads of opportunity for women. There's loads of opportunity for for slightly different perspectives on leadership as well. Because I think women just bring something slightly different to that party. We're really good at, you know, at listening, at having conversations, at building rapport. None of this is an attack on men doing this job, like I'm not anti men or but I just want to give women the same platform and the same opportunities. I just think that's really important,

and that's something that I've tried to do already during my career, but now feel like I'm in a position where I can do that kind of stuff even more.

And you talk about, and we were talking just briefly before we started recording just around you can't airlift women into certain leadership positions. And I guess the reality at the moment in this industry is that, yeah, there's definite sort of an outnumbering of men versus women at the in the top of a lot of these businesses, or towards the top a lot of these businesses from my chair, there then are two sort of key challenges. One is helping that next. It's not even the next generation, but that current generation of great planners, investment managers, wealth managers, who are in that position, see the future. Because to your point, when they're looking up in the business, if it's you surrounded by five other men, as it were, and feeling outnumbered, that becomes maybe a bit of a barrier. I don't mean a barrier to their success at all, but I mean barrier of like you want to see, you know, you want to see more of that sort of success. How are you

how do you help the women that you mentor and the women that you directly lead on that journey?

It's really good question, because I don't think I've actually formalized how I do this. Yeah, at the moment, it's things like one to ones like, like, we go, I have a lady who I go for breakfast with fairly often, and we just chat through things. It's about giving them a confidence and that to trust you, so that because this stuff is quite close to her. Home. I'm still involved in the business that they're working in, so I want them to trust me and know that I'll be discreet. And it's about cheerleading them from the sidelines. So for example, when we've had advisors leave and we're redistributing a client book, is there an opportunity then to bring some of these ladies into some of these relationships? Can you know, can some of them fit, particularly with a female and that happened recently, actually, funnily enough, it was to my credit, to my benefit, not to anyone else's. But the investment manager said to me, well, actually, this is a female led

family. We'd really like a female advisor to step in. Fantastic. I'd love to, but that's the kind of opportunity that I also try and give to all of the other female advisors, trying to find out what kind of development things they need help with. Like, is it, is it technical stuff that you need? Is it confidence building? We've got lots of resources within rathbones, learning and development, you know, what kind of support can we get for you? Development Plans, all of that kind of stuff. So it's, it's fairly informal at the moment, and I tend not just to work in my own team, but to look across the department in London, because there's not that many female advisors, and I've been working on, been working on bringing those women together as a community, so just small things, like a teams channel, where we can share things, not technical things, but like interesting articles, or, you know, Whatever might be on your mind, or if you just want a bit of support with something, you

know, someone you could reach out to. So we've done that so little things like that. I'm just starting to formalize now, just to bring a grow a sense of community. So even if it's not me that's helping them, it doesn't have to be me that's helping them, but if they know the other female FPS, then there's, like loads of us, right?

Can I ask for your opinion on something? Because it's, I mean, the way that financial services will be required within this country will be around the fact that women will have a high share of assets available to invest, right? That's the case because of the age and demographics that women sit you will live longer than men, and other aspects around how intergenerational wealth will all occur, etc, etc, which is, which is great. You're talking about the fact that you've got this 18% of advisors are female. Is it going to be a case that the market is asking for more female advisors? To your point, that actually this person wants a female advisor? Or do you think actually the industry might have a bit more of a forward vision and a plan. I think there's a kind of a plan from what you're saying and actually prepare for that transfer...

They should have a plan. I'm not sure they do. I think it's very much up to the individual businesses, rather than an industry led in rathbones, for example, we've got a grad scheme and an apprenticeship scheme. So we've got three graduates in our financial planning department at the moment. All three are ladies, which is fantastic. So, you know, we've got, you know, we're trying to really grow our own talent, which I think is really important. And I know lots of firms do that. The wealth transfer is interesting, because we're not just inheriting money, but we're making money. So women are making more money now we're controlling the wealth, which is really important. It's, it's, it's not just kind of passively coming to us. So I think women are much more engaged with their finances. That's probably a generational thing. There's probably quite a big difference in generations I see. So what we try and do, or what we always do, is make sure that if

there's a female partner, female client, they're always included in those conversations, which hasn't historically been the case. I think that's actually a relatively recent change where we, you know, the industry, used to just take the word of the, you know, of mister who was sitting in front of you, who would say, Oh, my wife will just agree with whatever i i decide, which is pretty scary, really, isn't it? When you think that's not that long ago that we were just long ago that we were just having those conversations, so making sure that female partners are front and center in those conversations is really important, because there's quite a lot of data that shows that when mister dies, Mrs. will take her money and go and find another advisor. So if we don't include them, we're missing, you know, missing a big trick. I mean, you have to be quite sensitive to how the female partner might engage differently, particularly with some older clients that I've worked with some

nervousness around finances. You know, they're worried that they don't understand or that it's not really a world they've been, they've been part of. So making sure that you're, you know, asking questions, finding out what's important to them, and maybe communicating with them in a slightly different way. So I always find that cash flow models are really great as a kind of opener, because they're visual, they're colorful, they're not dry. So you're not just sitting talking about investment returns and markets, but you're talking about, can I afford to give my kids money for a house deposit? Can I afford to retire if my husband dies before me? Have I got enough money to, you know, stay in my own home? Those are all kind of really relevant questions that bring the plan to life, rather than just talking about what the FTSE has done.

It's really interesting that. That opinion, isn't it? And how does the industry shirk the image that it's a male dominated industry for these females that are actively gathering wealth, passively gathering wealth, as you've just described, like we've got to, got to get rid of this cloak, right, or shed that skin, because if I look from the outside, I'm not a financial planner, investment manager or wealth manager. It does feel very male dominated by the population, but we know females are going to be the ones that we want to attract as clients. So how do you shed that skin and, you know, and change the colors sooner?

So representation is a big one, and that's going to take time. Giving those women who are in industry a profile. You know, how much do you hear about hear from them on things like social media or in the kind of advertising campaigns that we're doing, putting these people front and center. And you've got to think about, you know, even things like client events, golf days. I mean, somebody just love golf. I mean, fantastic, but I don't play golf. I don't know if any of the other female fps or F ops play golf. So immediately, we're kind of out of that. So we need to think about the type of events that we're doing for clients. So we have some great female events, so things like the Cartier exhibition, not just for females exclusively, but, you know, with that kind of mindset on the Cartier exhibition, we had a frameless event, which is that interactive, immersive art experience, which was fantastic. And we sponsor the city Christmas fair, which raises money for

women's well being charities. So you have so I think you need to just shift your thinking a little bit and think about what women are interested in and how you can engage with them, because it's completely different to how men will engage with you.

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about the female growth within sort of the client base, essentially. So where that future, where that future opportunity comes from, if we think about some of the things that are disrupting this industry at the moment, things like the sort of the technology that we're using, and the way that that's kind of coming in, and how that can be a great enabler, but also how that's potentially a threat as well. What's your take on on that? Like, you know, what do you see as the as the opportunity? First of all, with AI and advancements in technology, in this in this sector?

I feel like I'm one of those memes on social media when I talk about AI. Have you seen them where they say, are you still only using chat GBT to brush up your emails? That's me, until about six months ago, I wasn't even that person, but I think it's really important, and I have started paying a lot more attention to AI and as a business, we have to, you know, things like automating meeting notes, prep for client meetings going to shave huge amounts of time off what we do automating things like suitability reports, although I have to caveat by saying that clients are paying A lot of money for the advice that we give them, and removing the person from that equation is just something I don't think you can do fully. So whilst you might, you know, automate a suitability report to an extent, making sure that that is still bespoke and is still personalized is really important, and it doesn't look just like it's coming off a production line. I don't I think

you'll be able to streamline some of the processes and make the industry more efficient, but you're never at that kind of high net worth level. You won't replace the human being in those relationships. And whether that's a virtual relationship using teams, which a lot of clients like these days, or face to face doesn't really matter, but they value having someone to talk to face to face. And I don't think you'll I don't think you'll ever kind of replace that with technology, so we need to use it to make ourselves more efficient. But just be mindful that, you know, it's you'd want to be if you're paying a lot of money for a financial planning service, you want to be sat in the main, sat in front of a person who's going to listen to you understand you. Not a robot.

And that, you know technology as a teammate. That's typically what we're hearing. One of the things, and this is quite off skew, so keen to get your thoughts on this, the industries we work in, whether that is technology, professional services or financial services, when people are buying or using technology, their businesses, actually, at a business level, are asking for an optimized cost back. So you've described a few ways that the industry is using technology, preparing for meetings, writing reports. As a consumer potentially, I'm going, well, you're you know that there's you're charging me this, yeah, but you're actually optimizing your processes by Why do you think there's some element around being more customer centric the industry could be and actually providing something back by using technology, ie a reduction in cost, or anything else like that?

I'm not sure we've got to that point yet. Yeah, I can definitely see it coming. I mean, if you take the parallel with charges on investment funds that are coming down because, you know, scales of economy, you know, the fees are becoming squeezed, and I can see how that would translate into if you can run an office much more efficiently, you know that maybe that's something for the future. I'm not sure I see that at the moment, though, in the industry, I don't think we're quite there yet.

Do you think that would create more access? I. Way from the top 5% of high earners because, because that's fundamentally one of the economy's challenges is that we as a country do not understand our finances well, but the regulators and the businesses are set up to provide services for the top one to 5% kind of leaving 95% of people to sort of search for the solution, whether that's through Tiktok or anything else. So if we're able to optimize costs at corporate level, maybe actually we could serve a greater population?

Maybe there's a separate segment, a different segment, that you would want to design something around for using Ai, yeah, absolutely, because you're right, there is a massive gap and a big lack of education. But I think if you flip that over, I think one of the challenges the industry has as well is that we over complicate things, and we use too much jargon, and we speak in tongues most of the time, don't we, you know? And so if you're trying to engage with this as Joe Public, and you're reading about LSA and lsdba and tax free cash and PCLs and all these kind of weird and wonderful acronyms and Flexi drawdown. And, you know, there was, I've got a I've got a guide at home, like a government brochure, and in the back of it, there's about six pages of vocab, just explaining, like a glossary, explaining what these terms mean. I get it right. You study for years and years for your exams. We're very clever people, and we know what we're talking about, but

we need to think about the people that we are communicating with. And that doesn't mean dumbing it down, doesn't, you know, but it means, can you talk about this in plain English? Can you explain it in a way that someone you know coming in to see you for the first time would understand our suitability reports are can be huge. I mean, they just can be huge, and they're full of jargon, and I think that's a real challenge for us as an industry. It's about accessibility.

And that feels like those reports are built for the for the regulator and the business, because it's like, here's here's my covering, here's my wall of protection. But maybe technology has a place where it understands me much more deeply than maybe an organization that I'm about to work with, like Rathbones or another organization, and maybe, actually, we can use technology to put that suitability report to go this is the profile of Jonny Adams. This is his age demographics, his past experiences and the way his behavioral insights. And actually, imagine if it just tweaked and tailored it, because if you send me a report longer than two pages, I won't read it. If it's got more than five acronyms, I'll get bored. And that's actually a thing that you're trying to mitigate, is by giving me the advice and the background, but I just won't read it.

Another reason why you can't remove the person from that conversation, right? Yeah, at the moment, they're the ones that make that report make sense, but we could improve the report writing to help that conversation, to help engagement. I think it's a big piece, and we're doing some work on that, so we're really trying to do that. And I know a lot of firms are trying to work on reports, but it is a massive challenge for everybody. You know, we're still getting 25, 30 page reports. It's interesting. So I think there's a bit of a confidence gap. So I don't think that women don't know what they're doing. I don't think they're, you know, necessarily more risk averse than men, but I think that they perhaps think about things longer and they're less confident about what they're doing. So they're not just going to rush into investing all their money in a crypto or whatever it might be. I mean, if I think of my nephew who's 21 goodness me, 21 who has control of

his child Trust Fund, slash, Junior isa now, and has been dabbling in day trading, and has lost quite a lot of money, actually, by making, you know, just some just going right in with the investment decisions, no background, no kind of no knowledge of how investments work or financial service. You know, you could say that, you know, as a good aunt, I should have educated him in that respect. But I didn't really even know he was doing it until I found out that he'd lost money. And I just think you need to all these influences. Yeah, you know, on Tiktok, if you've got a fairly good grounding, you can watch them and think, Okay, I get that. I can pick that up. That's not quite right. I don't like that. If you haven't, and most kids are coming out of school without that, how do you know what they're whether what they're saying is right or wrong? And this is before these kids have learned about budgeting, having a rainy day fund, goal based savings. So you know, don't

invest anything you want to spend in the next few years, because if you lose all that money, what are you going to do?

And we know consequence or loss impacts us twice as much as gains, right? So you have to allow people to lose in a parameter of boundaries into a point. But the point about education is really crucial, and there isn't enough education. So are they just going to go to the most accessible place, which is the platform.

Which tends to be a family, or they the family, or what you see online, and I. With families, that conversation is quite difficult often, because parents don't tend to talk about money that much with children. And we know we did some, we had some conversations about this, and we did, we did a webinar last year about talking starting those conversations within the family, and it was really aimed at slightly older kind of whether the children are adults, those conversations are hard enough. But talking to, you know, teenagers or younger children about money can be quite challenging too. And I've, I think about it with Lucy, and I'm trying to my daughter's nearly 13, trying to encourage her to put a little bit of her pocket money away every month. You know, just this maybe a 10% rule, you know, just save it so you've got a little bit of money stored up, but I'm having limited success. But starting early is so key. So I've been saving for her since she was

born. Now. I mean, it's small amounts. It's never going to change her life, but the power of starting at a young age, that compounding, that just leaving that investment to run for I mean, goodness knows how old she's going to be when she can access her pension fund. But, you know, we're probably talking another 50 years, and that's, I think, what gets what gets missed, and that kind of feeds in as well to just really basic things like, so I talked about budgeting rainy day funds, but things like pension schemes, like joining your employer's pension scheme, or putting it, you know, getting those, those employer contributions, and maybe topping your contribution up a little bit to get more money from them, which is free money. That kind of education is really, really important. Now, I get that, you know, it's difficult, isn't it, because if you're coming out of uni, you've probably got lots of debt, you probably want to get on the housing ladder, or you're paying rent. If

you look at having a family, it's so expensive. There's so many pressures on what money people have. But I feel like we haven't even really given that kind of foundation of education to a lot of people so that they can even be aware of, you know, what they're doing.

it enough in order to be able to give their own because they haven't grown up with that advice themselves either. The other thing, of course, is I think access to if I remember myself growing up, I didn't have access to completely unregulated, I'm not suggesting regulations the answer. I didn't have access to any of that unregulated, unmanaged advice anywhere as a teenager growing up, so I was sort of forced into talking to my my family, thankfully, quite well, sort of financially educated, so I had pretty good advice. But that risk now is that, like you said, that kids have that access. They go, Yeah, okay, I'll buy crypto. Oh yeah, I'm going to become a day trader. That's my job out of uni. And then they watch half a dozen YouTube videos of people who've frankly lucked out, yeah, and, you know, are now millionaires. And they go, Yeah, this is great. I'm going to put my entire Junior ISIS savings in at the age of 18, and one day, yeah, and, and hope for

the best.

Yeah yeah. The parents thing is really interesting. I mean, I didn't grow up with mobile phones. I'm pretty old. No, no, tick tock, no Insta, nothing. So if it didn't exist in the family, it just didn't exist. And it didn't exist in my family. And when my mum and dad got divorced when I was kind of 19, 20 that was the first time she'd ever had a bank account in her own name, you know? And just not that long ago, and I just remember her going through this kind of, wow, I've got to run my own bank account. And I've never done this before, and it was a whole journey for her. And she had some store cards, and they were really expensive, and she had to put a plan together to pay them off herself. And you know, it was, if I think about what formed my view of finance. I've never intended to be in this industry, but if I think about what drives me, it's that financial independence. I always thought from that point, I want to be able to support myself. I want to

understand what money I have and what it's doing, and I don't want to be in debt if you don't have a family that talks about it, or if you don't have experiences like that, you know. And it was also really fortunate to come out of uni with no debt because there were no tuition fees. I just scraped it in the last year, no tuition fees. But how would I feel if I'd come out of uni with 30 or 40 grands worth of debt? I mean, it's crippling, isn't it? So you have to be really conscious that it's a completely different mindset. In different generations, they respond completely differently, which is really understandable.

Yeah, yeah. Rebecca, hold that thought, looking forward to picking our conversation up right there in part two.