SER Summit tops record for Latino financial advisor event

The ranks of Latino clients and wealth management professionals are growing, if a conference this week outside Chicago is any indication.

With sold-out attendance at about triple the size of its first gathering for Latino financial advisors and wealth management professionals two years ago, the SER Summit started with a discussion about its larger meaning and gratitude to the many big-name sponsors.

“We built this summit on community because we know what it feels like to search for something that isn’t there and then decide to create it,” Ana Trujillo Limón, director of business development and marketing with training and coaching firm Corazon Financial Advocates, said in opening remarks quoting from a letter written by SER conference organizing committee member Gloria S. Garcia Cisneros, a wealth manager in the Los Angeles office of LourdMurray.

“That’s exactly what we did when we dreamed this up, because when you bring Latinos together in a room like this, magic happens,” Limón said.

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Big industry names sponsor SER Summit

Limón and the other co-founder of this week’s SER Summit for Latinos in Financial Services, Vanessa Martinez, the CEO and founder of Chicago-based registered investment advisory firm Expressive Wealth, spoke before 140 attendees at the beginning of the conference. Then attendees wrote letters to their future selves listing their experiences, accomplishments and lessons in coming months.   

Sponsors including Prudential, LPL Financial, Hilltop Securities, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Morgan Stanley, Carson Group, the BLX Internship, the Financial Planning Association, Envestnet, Wealthspire Advisors, XY Planning Network, Wealth.com and The American College of Financial Services reflected the industry’s embrace of an expanding event that may be the only one of its kind focusing specifically on Latinos in wealth management.

“Our main goal is always to get people in the room,” Martinez said. “That is very important. So as much as dollars are important to us, people are most important. So thank you to all our supporting sponsors for getting the word out to have people come to the event.”

Tobias Salinger

The theme for this year’s conference is “Igniting Your Power: Empowering Success Juntos.” In addition to translating to the foundational Spanish verb “to be,” the “SER” in the conference’s name stands for “support, educate and recharge.”

The summit began in 2023 as a companion event to the FPA’s annual conference with about 50 people in attendance before operating as a standalone event last year in San Diego with roughly 120 attendees. Since only about 2,900 certified financial planners — fewer than 3% of the ranks across the field — are Hispanic or Latino, the group is underrepresented in the industry compared to the U.S. population, but also one with a proud presence in the profession. 

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Growth strategies

As a base of customers, Latinos also constitute a substantial target consumer for wealth management firms, according to a panel at the summit on the Latino client market in wealth management. About 20% of the U.S. population is Hispanic, and the group generates more than $4 trillion in economic activity each year, according to Elaine King, founder of Coral Gables, Florida-based RIA company Elaine King Family and Money Matters Institute.

In order to work with more Latino clients, advisors and firms could start by understanding that their families trace their roots back to many countries and regions.

“It’s more about being empathetic and putting yourself in their shoes and understanding the culture,” King said, “because we are all Latinos, but within the Latin American geography, there are different cultures.”

Part of breaking into that market of customers means navigating a “layer of distrust” among many people around topics like insurance, according to Cely Castillo, Hilltop’s multicultural recruiting and relationship manager. So advisors and wealth management firms more generally need to “change that into, okay, ‘I’m not here to sell you, I’m here to empower you,'” she said.

Other methods for connecting with Latino clients include forging connections with local Hispanic chambers of commerce, a tactic that both Castillo and King called out as especially important to do. But the process may require a longer timeline, Castillo said.

“It’s going to be a little hand-holding, but their returns are great,” she said. “And not just that. Your work is going to become easier because they’re going to refer their uncle, their neighbor, la prima. You know, it’s just amazing, because loyalty is huge. And you know this, we’re Latinos, we’re big on loyalty. So if it’s done right to us, we’re going to do right by them, too.”

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Tobias Salinger

Trust in any language

In terms of language, whether that is Spanish or English matters much less than grasping how to work with clients who “have hugely successful businesses” but fear the risks of investing in capital markets, according to Miguel Gomez, the president of El Paso, Texas-based RIA firm Sophronia Wealth Advisors. For example, a client recently “opened up” to Gomez for the first time to ask him to explain stocks, Gomez noted.

“He’s a plumber, a very successful plumber,” he said. “He’s got a big company, a lot of people under him, but he had the humility to ask what a stock is. What that tells me about it is that he finally trusts me to ask those kinds of questions, because I always tell my clients there are no dumb questions. There are some things that you don’t know, there are some things that I don’t know, and the only way to learn it is to ask us.”

The Latino client base compares to the gross domestic product the “size of some large countries,” so “the opportunity in the market is there,” said Hasan Ibrahim, the territory vice president for Prudential’s central region. But Latinos are “fiercely loyal, and you have to earn that trust,” Ibrahim said. He recalled how his abuela purchased products and services advertised on the Univision show “Sábado Gigante” because “they built the trust level” and “she knew that she understood them.”

Still, that process takes authentic marketing and, often, a lot of time. And the industry may struggle with many of the steps, considering its demographics, Ibrahim noted.

“You’re 90% there in terms of building that trust, because you sound like this target market, you look like this target market, you culturally understand them,” he said. “That’s a huge, huge advantage, because the problem in our industry is we don’t have enough volume. There’s just not enough Latino advisors in this market to take advantage or conquer, sort of, this massive opportunity. We need more of you.”