Voices

The most secure jobs in wealth management

If you are lucky enough to have kids or family members who listen to advice, Bernie Clark has some for them — especially if they’re looking for a job or deciding what to study.

“The hardest person to hire in today’s world is the compliance and cybersecurity-type employee,” Schwab’s head of advisor services tells me. “They are in high, high demand.”

Bernie Clark

Schwab isn’t the only company seeking to hire specialists in these areas. Firms large and small are struggling to meet regulators’ demands and protect themselves from cyberattacks. “Those are the biggest risks companies have right now,” Clark says, adding that there’s little chance these jobs will fall out of favor if stocks have sharp and sustained declines. They may be “even more important in down markets,” he emphasizes.

No. 3 on Clark’s list of occupations with job security: technologists. “It’s a critical hire for us,” he tells me. But not just Schwab, he adds. “If I ask an advisor what their two biggest challenges are, they will tell me that it is technology and talent.”

Read more: Amazon employees, we're hiring.

Technology and talent are also the major themes of our deep-dive analysis "United Capital at a crossroads.” By many accounts, United Capital CEO Joe Duran has the latter in spades and he has also upgraded the RIA aggregator’s tech offerings aggressively by developing and improving its FinLife platform. But as Duran seeks new cash to boost the firm’s growth, will investors value it as an up-and-coming fintech firm, or see it more as a legacy RIA aggregator?

Senior Editor Charles Paikert set out to find the answer.

“Duran is a brash industry icon with seemingly boundless energy and ambition,” he tells me. But that combination has “generated great success as well as a healthy dose of skepticism within the industry.”

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Career advancement RIAs Fintech Cyber security Compliance Financial regulations Charles Schwab United Capital
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