A nonprofit organization that trains underrepresented young people for careers in finance and connects them with Wall Street internships has a new executive director.
Wall Street Bound Executive Director Walter Rendon spent a decade in the industry before his 20 years in education. He is the founder of consulting firm Educational Achievement, a former official in the New York City Department of Education and a current board member at charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx. In February, Rendon joined Wall Street Bound, which finance veteran
The organization runs a four-month intensive training called Wall Street Direct, a 15- to 20-hour educational module it calls Bootcamps and industry volunteering efforts such as teaching and mentoring. So Wall Street Bound seeks to help college students and recent graduates find rewarding careers while helping the industry solve its recruiting and succession challenges.
In the Q&A below, Rendon explained what led him to the organization and the status of its big goal to guide 10,000 young people into finance by 2030. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
READ MORE:
An ambitious undertaking
Financial Planning: I wanted to start out by first asking you, what got you interested in Wall Street Bound and its mission and attracted you to this position?
Walter Rendon: I think two things brought me and Troy together to help continue the work that he's been doing at Wall Street Bound. I think the first was my original experience growing up in rural New Mexico as a Chicano and having just one or two opportunities when I came to New York, pivotally, similarly to what's being offered at Wall Street Bound, gave me the opportunity to work at Credit Suisse First Boston in equity research. But having a mentor and having that support made that happen. And so I feel and understand the mission very well as a lived experience.
And the second that I look at is, my nonprofit work after leaving Credit Suisse First Boston was in education, helping start a charter school in Washington Heights called School in the Square, still being on the board, and then being on the board of neighborhood charter of Parliament in the Bronx for students with neurodivergence. Both keep me in the education space. And I've been there for 15 years. And I realized that, as I help build out success for students at the age of high school and college, there seems to be a big drop-off in the way that we nurture and help support students as they become independent. When they're young, of course, there's a lot of support. As they get older, we assume that they can do it on their own.
And there's always an opportunity to be a little more successful with a little more support, and that's what we offer at Wall Street Bound.
FP: In your letter to the Wall Street Bound community, you mentioned that ambitious but achievable goal to support 10,000 students by 2030. I know you just came aboard a couple of months ago, but where is Wall Street Bound on that goal, and what does Wall Street Bound need to to accomplish that goal?
WR: That is a lofty goal, and we have successfully pushed through the finish line over 2,000. We have 2,000 alums already, because we're built for scale. We're scaling to that next level. We're going to be able to double that fairly quickly.
To do that, though, it just requires us to have those partnerships with those organizations and firms that really want to see these students succeed at their firms, and that could be any financial institution. It's really extending themselves to say, "We want to partner with you. We see the value of you providing students who've passed the [FINRA Securities Industry Essentials exam, or] SIE," which is an exam they take at the end of our course. And they come in with tools in their belts. They have the skills and soft skills to help them succeed. And I think partners have really enjoyed having that opportunity to bring in a more inclusionary experience to their firm, just enhancing the enrichment of the success of the students.
All our students are amazing candidates for the work they do as interns, and we have an almost 83% success rate in terms of them going to internships. And we're now tracking to see — we haven't been around that long — how they are now in their careers in finance. We're doing a deeper dive on that to show the impact and the success from the support of these firms, and in terms of the career track.
FP: I know that those partners come from across the financial services landscape. Has Wall Street bound made inroads into the wealth management area, where these talented students could become financial advisors someday?
WR: We're finding now, as many cohorts or classes are finishing, that there are diverse interests. Yes, there are some quants. There are some sales. But there's a lot of movement recently for students to really be interested in wealth management and managing money and feeling that next layer of success. … We need to make sure they are exposed to that as an opportunity. Having those touchpoints with wealth management firms really gives us that opportunity to extend well and in terms of partnership and building these pathways.
READ MORE:
Navigating the wealth management field
FP: Are there some firms that have been partnering already with Wall Street Bound? How can financial advisors and other wealth management professionals out there partner with Wall Street Bound to start building more of those pathways?
WR: Certainly. We have a nice résumé, so to speak, of firms that we have worked with, some of the bigger firms like Morgan Stanley, or other more fintech-focused firms. But certainly we reached out to really help celebrate the success of our students. And when those firms see that, they like to re-up, and they continue to have that relationship with us.
A lot of times it extends, like you're saying, when you think about these students wanting to be in a more diverse part of finance. Yes, with these firms being very open to showing, especially in the interim intern experience, how well they take care of their interns and show them all the different parts of their financial institution, the students then really have a better opportunity to choose the path that they feel is best for them within the financial institutions, in terms of that educational process and presenting careers in finance, specifically for our audience in wealth management or in other other industries.
FP: What do you find are some of the most important lessons that students need to learn either from a technical side or a non-technical side as they pursue careers in finance?
WR: That's a great question, because the first thing everyone thinks is, oh, they have to have the math. And they do have the math and the background, and then they start to understand how to negotiate the world of finance. Understanding how different parts of finance work together is part of our learning mode, so that you're not siloed so much into what you know.
But on the other hand, there's also the soft skills. When our students finish with us, we have mentors from these organizations who have helped their résumé, right? They help with their LinkedIn page. They've helped with interview skills and just understanding how to navigate a room and how to understand how to work on a professional level. Those so-called soft skills are really almost mandatory now when you're on the Street, and those are some of the components of the work that we do with our students.
As we continue to work with them after they've taken our courses, we still stay in touch with them, and we still make sure that they have successes. There are times when they get to work and they find a job, and then they drop off for a bit, but we reach back out to them regularly to make sure that they can be the next generation of young mentors to help support the next generation of our student cohorts.
READ MORE:
Two-way relationships and a growing reach
FP: You mentioned how the mentorship that you had starting out in your career was so important to you. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why that is so important for students going through Wall Street Bound, or just young professionals in general, entering an industry that often has high barriers to entry?
WR: There's quite a few parts of the mentorship that come through that you don't know originally. For me, it was Al Jackson, who was the global head of equity research [at Credit Suisse First Boston], and sitting next to him, watching him, and kind of copying, until I figured out how to do it myself. I was copying what he was doing to be successful.
In terms of understanding the human components, we had hundreds of analysts, and just being able to walk the floor and speak to analysts and talk to them, understanding the trade, understanding the nuances of the cycle for the buy side and the sell side. For me, and I know that's very detailed, but just sitting and listening and then having those conversations. At first, it wasn't so warm and fuzzy, but then when he got confident in me, I was able to take over some of the work that he was doing. So I freed him up, and by doing that, I became the expert in a lot of the different parts of the business that were there. It was just amazing.
And of course, we're still in touch now, and he's retired and he started another job, but he's still someone I lean in on, just to get that support.
FP: That's great. Is there anything else our audience should know about Wall Street Bound's work and how they can get involved, not only in collaborating with Wall Street Bound, but building these pathways for young professionals, career changers, to come into wealth management and other financial services?
WR: I think the first thing would be, I know that we have a New York address, but, because of our build-out in the pandemic, we are global in terms of our reach, in terms of students that come in, because of how remote we are. We're working our way back into a more real-life class setting, but, as we do that, we are across the country, especially in the prime markets, from L.A., Chicago and, in the South, Atlanta, so we reach all throughout the United States, but we're also global.
That's important, because a lot of people think, "Oh, it's just New York." Of course, New York still has the moniker of being the finance capital, but there's certainly London and there's certainly Hong Kong who hold their own.
And I think that's one of the things — that if you think about Wall Street Bound, you're thinking about really finding diverse talent that doesn't always come to the top immediately, and we provide that, and we bring that to the forefront. And firms always love that, because they are able to become more inclusionary, and they're able to expand the work that they do with new perspectives.
