This month, the Women’s Alliance of Financial Advisors is pleased to celebrate our third year of partnership with Signature Wealth. As a Strategic Business Partner of the Women’s Alliance of Financial Advisors, Signature Wealth continues to play an important role in advancing our mission to empower women in the financial advising profession. We’re grateful for their collaboration and look forward to another year of making an impact together.
We were excited to chat with Signature Wealth’s Chief Marketing Officer, Bobbie Adkins, about the company’s mission and its partnership with the Women’s Alliance.
To start, can you tell us about the mission of Signature Wealth?
Signature Wealth started as a single practice in Florence, South Carolina. Today we manage $2.8 billion for more than 3,580 families across 15 communities in the Southeast. We attribute our continued growth to the community we’ve built and fostered. Our community goes well beyond investment management and financial planning for clients.
We believe a wealth planning firm is only as good as its culture, and our culture starts and ends with people. Not just the clients we serve, but our own team too. We don’t spend time telling people we care. We let it show through how we act, backed by a team of advisors who bring both real expertise and genuine empathy to the table.
We sum up our culture in one word: COOL. Collaborative, because we lean on each other’s expertise to build plans that actually fit each client. Open-minded, because we stay curious about new trends and approaches instead of getting stuck in old ones. Others-focused, because a client’s financial goals are about them, not our egos. Loyal, meaning we hold each other accountable and keep our word.
With this community and culture in place, our mission is to help everyone think bigger about their wealth and their financial life, not just those with significant assets to manage. We run community programs across the towns we serve, built to grow financial literacy, conscious wealth planning, and philanthropy for people who may never sit across the desk from one of our advisors. Programs that support women investors, families of color, and disadvantaged youth, just to name a few. Helping someone build a $10 million legacy and helping a newly divorced woman figure out her finances for the first time come from the same place for us. Everyone deserves to build financial confidence and live a lifestyle that actually fulfills them.
How are women redefining wealth, and how has that influenced the way you serve clients?
94% of women believe they’ll be personally responsible for their finances at some point in their lives1. That’s nearly every woman we’ll ever work with. And yet women are still paid, on average, 83.6% of what a man makes in the same role2. For Black and Hispanic women, that gap is even wider. Career interruptions from raising kids or caring for aging parents chip away at lifetime earnings too, which shows up later as a real gap in Social Security benefits; women receive about 80% of what men receive on average3.
At the same time, women’s wealth is set to surge. Baby boomer spouses are expected to transfer an estimated $30 trillion to their widows over the next decade4. That’s a massive shift, and it raises a real question for our industry: will these women trust us to manage it?
We think women are both underserved as clients and underrepresented as advisors in this industry, and those two problems are connected. So we built Women’s Worth Alliance to close the gap on the client side, supporting women through storytelling, education, and relationship building, not just spreadsheets and statements. We believe every woman deserves access to great financial advice, and ideally a female advisor on her team who understands her specific story.
In addition to WWA on the client side, we continue to recruit and support female advisors, which is why we partnered with Women’s Alliance of Financial Advisors to give our female advisors the unique support they need so they can be the best advisor to our clients.
(Sources: 1: Bank of America, 2022 study, newsroom.bankofamerica.com, 2: BLS, “Women’s earnings were 83.6 percent of men’s in 2023” 3:Brookings Institution “How does gender equality affect women in retirement?”, 4: McKinsey, “US wealth management: A growth agenda for the coming decade“
What inspired Signature Wealth to partner with the Women’s Alliance of Financial Advisors?
We built the Women’s Worth Alliance in 2020 to serve women on the client side, but we kept running into the same problems from the advisor side. Recruiting and developing female advisors takes more than just hiring. It takes the right resources and support built for what a woman navigating a male-centered industry actually needs. We were introduced to Stephanie Gularte as she was growing resources for the Women’s Alliance of Financial Advisors, and she shared stories and pointed us to women who had made significant progress and career pivots once they had this network of women to lean on. We immediately knew this partnership was crucial to helping us support our current and future female advisors. It gave us a way to keep investing in our female advisors specifically, the same way WWA lets us invest in our female clients.
Why do you believe it’s important for organizations across the industry to invest in advancing women in financial advising?
Because the two problems compound each other. Women are underserved as clients, and women are underrepresented as advisors, and if the industry only fixes one side, the other keeps holding it back. When we invest in getting more women into this profession and give them real support, mentorship, and a network, not just a desk, everyone benefits. Our own advisors have seen it firsthand: finding a network of women to lean on has been the difference in how their careers took off.
It also just makes business sense. Women investors tend to be more loyal to their advisors and refer more often than other clients. Firms that don’t invest in advancing women, on either side of the table, are leaving real growth on the table. That said, we’d rather build the practice that already supports our own mothers, sisters, and daughters than wait for the industry to catch up and tell us that serving women is the next trend.
What advice would you share with women advisors who are looking to grow their careers and make a lasting impact?
Start with your own money story. Before you can guide anyone else’s mindset around money, it helps to understand your own habits and beliefs, including the ones you didn’t realize you were carrying. And then share your story with other women and encourage them to think about and share theirs too. We’ve seen real progress happen when women sit together and explore their experiences and beliefs around money.
Also, find your people early. Representation really does matter. Surrounding yourself with other women in this business, ones a few steps ahead and ones coming up alongside you, changes what feels possible in your own career. Step out of your own way, make connections, and the financial education and technical skills you build from there give you real traction.
And remember that your journey matters to the next woman coming up behind you. So always keep sharing.
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At the Women’s Alliance, we believe that financial advising is an incredibly fulfilling path for women seeking purpose, flexibility, and success. We are passionate about creating firm-neutral connections where women lift one another up.
If you are interested in learning about how your firm can collaborate with the Women’s Alliance of Financial Advisors as a Strategic Business Partner, reach out directly to our CEO at Stephanie@womensalliancefa.org.
