Despite being in agreement with the McKinsey report and others like it, the CII’s Ms Fisher believes that focusing on larger companies means that improving diversity in an small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) context tends to be left out of the equation.
She says: “It almost lets SMEs say: ‘Well, that’s alright if you’re British Airways, but it’s much harder for me’, as it were. But a section of the McKinsey report talks about how powerful diversity has always been in entrepreneurship, which effectively is what a lot of the planning market is. It is people’s own businesses.
“So if you made it work for yourself, and then you turn around and say you can’t now support other people with diversity, then you’re potentially going to be holding your business and the entrepreneurs of the next generation back.”
Specific benefits for the advice industry would likely include the ability to attract a wider range of business. Younger advisers are seen as aiding efforts to work with a new generation of clients, and the same philosophy should apply to a diverse workforce.
So far, the financial advice sector, which is visibly dominated by older males, has not developed its own ways of reporting levels of representation in terms of race, sexual orientation and gender.
However, there are a number of professional networks in the industry specifically for under-represented communities. Link, the LGBT Insurance Network, has been running since 2012, and regularly engages with a number of firms to help employers become more inclusive.
The CII – one of the 122 signatories of the Women In Finance charter – has also been instrumental in promoting diversity across the board. In addition to considering how language alone can be a barrier to inclusivity, the Institute plays an active role in supporting diversity initiatives.
Ms Fisher concludes: “Often the historical way that the language of financial services works sounds as if it’s non-inclusive, but actually if you talk to the advisers personally, they’d say it’s not a problem.
“At the CII, we spend a lot of time trying to join up the diversity networks that sit within individual companies because often they get a lot of energy to start with, but then after a while they start to wonder what they could do better. But they often don’t know about each other, whereas because we’re the professional body, we get to know most of them.”
