The women who could be great wealth advisors often never become one. The industry never found them, never made the case, never built the pipeline. Jessica Jung made it anyway, and what her practice looks like today is a pretty good argument for what the industry has been missing.
Hearing What the Numbers Can't Say
The standard advisory model treats a financial plan as the product. The relationship is scaffolding, useful for getting to the sale and maintained afterward to prevent the client from leaving.
Jung's approach treats it the other way around. Her work divides into two parts: the mechanics, which her team handles; financial plans, tax minimisation, investment strategy, and what she calls the coaching component, the harder half that most firms never name as a deliverable at all.
"To attain financial freedom, there are the mechanics that my team and I do. That's part of the financial plan and strategy, but there's also the emotional aspect, which is equally important."
A client who arrives stressed about market volatility doesn't get handed a chart. They get a conversation about what the volatility means for their specific situation, held by someone who already knows what keeps them up at night.
Client meetings sometimes get rescheduled too, not because the advisor is unavailable, but because the client isn't ready. If someone isn't in the right headspace to absorb important financial information, Jung pivots, discusses other topics, and returns to the substantive conversation another time.
Difficult to teach. Easy to undervalue. The clients who've experienced it tend to know the difference.
Credentials Climbing, Gap Persisting
Financial services has long acknowledged its gender imbalance, at conferences, in industry whitepapers, in periodic commitments to do better. Female CFP professionals grew 13.9% between 2021 and 2024, outpacing growth among men, according to the CFP Board.
The baseline remains low enough that growth percentages can flatter the situation. Women still hold fewer than a quarter of CFP credentials, in a profession where clients are increasingly asking for qualities that research associates with female advisors: attentiveness, clear communication, and a willingness to address the full picture of a client's life rather than the balance sheet alone.
Jessica Jung has seen this mismatch from the inside. Her client base is predominantly male, seasoned professionals who arrived looking for financial expertise and found, over time, that what they valued equally was having an advisor who understood their lives well enough to be a genuine sounding board.
Male advisors build those relationships, too.
The question the data raises is whether the profession has historically rewarded that approach, or whether it has rewarded a narrower set of skills and is only now catching up to what clients have been asking for all along.
What "Soft Skills" Actually Do When Markets Fall Apart
"Soft skills" carry the word soft for a reason. It implies something pleasant to have but secondary to the real work. The capabilities the term describes: listening, reading emotional register, building trust over time, knowing when not to push, are what determine whether a client holds to a financial plan when markets turn or abandons it at exactly the wrong moment.
Behavioral research has tracked this gap for years. The average equity investor has underperformed the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years, largely because emotional responses to volatility override rational strategy. An advisor's job, in moments of stress, is to be the steadier voice in the room.
Jung has made this her explicit methodology, preparing clients during calm periods to reframe downturns as buying opportunities. Come a correction, "they're less fearful. They see these as entry points for getting into certain positions." The preparation is psychological as much as financial, and it requires an advisor who has built enough trust that the client takes the call and listens when everything feels like it's falling apart.
Influence of that kind accumulates through dozens of conversations about things that never appear on any financial statement. She traces it back to a principle from Tony Robbins: "You become indispensable if you add more value than everyone else or anyone else in that role."
Indispensability is what keeps a client from walking across the street when a competitor offers lower fees. It's built through attentiveness, not alpha.
A Talent Shortage the Industry Built for Itself
The advisory profession is ageing out faster than it is producing new entrants. According to Cerulli Associates, more than 109,000 advisors plan to retire over the next decade, representing 37.5% of total industry headcount and carrying 41.5% of total assets, while the rookie failure rate hovers around 72%. Meanwhile, the client base is growing wealthier and expecting more from advisory relationships, not less.
Bringing more women into the profession is, at this point, both a diversity conversation and a practical one. The talent pool has always been there. The pipeline to reach it has not kept pace.
Jessica Jung raised the idea of coaching clients on health and lifestyle habits as part of the advisory relationship, a practice she developed around insurance medical exam preparation, which frequently produced permanent behaviour changes, at a study group meeting with fellow advisors. The room found it interesting.
Nobody was doing it.
The data on emotional intelligence in client relationships is not new. The client demand for it is not new. The advisor shortage is not new. The industry has been aware of all three for some time.
Jessica Jung, CFP® is the founder of Vast Wealth Advisors. She helps business owners and high-net-worth individuals align their resources with their goals through customized wealth strategies. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
Securities offered through Registered Representatives of Cambridge Investment Research, Inc, a broker-dealer member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services through Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor. Cambridge and Vast Wealth Advisors are not affiliated. Cambridge does not offer tax or legal advice. Fixed insurance services offered through independent insurance carriers.
