Change is flowing in the financial services industry.

At a glittering luncheon in the nation's capital last year, a veteran warrior rallied a roomful of Black America's brightest (and richest) young executives. Andrew Young was a U.S. ambassador, a congressman, the mayor of Atlanta. But he's still clearly a product of the civil rights demonstrations where he risked his life with Dr. Martin Luther King.

Young told the National Association of Securities Professionals, "I want to be with you because you are [today's] Civil Rights Movement." He explained that after his generation had struggled to desegregate accommodations, schools, and other aspects of American life, "now we're trying to integrate the money. You're at the forefront of the movement for equality."

If you're interested in the world of investments, banking, insurance or other financial services, you indeed can make a difference. But know what the industry is about. These days, the business is undergoing more upheavals than a rookie cruise ship passenger. Banks are shutting traditional branches, supplanting them with automatic teller machines in supermarkets. Wall Street investment houses and investors lost a trillion dollars in the bond crash of 1994; although the market came roaring back to profitability in 1995, there's only a trickle of the public finance deals for which African-American investment bankers were once hired in droves.

On the plus side, African Americans in financial services can't help but benefit from the unprecedented amount of wealth that the World War II-era population will leave to Baby Boomers - eight to ten trillion dollars - in the next 10 years. Much of that comes from our communities. "Minorities generate over $600 billion a year in spending power. That's a lot of money," emphasizes the human resources director for Phoenix Home Life Insurance Company, Fredrica Gray. "So companies that want to stay ahead of the game realize they benefit enormously from hiring African Americans, Hispanics, and other so-called minority groups."

Insurance

That's why Phoenix Home Life, based in Enfield, Connecticut, recently wooed a 20-year insurance veteran from The Travelers Group to spearhead more minority hirings. "In the past, [White insurers] left these customers alone," says Frank J. Smith, who now heads up emerging markets development at Phoenix Home Life. "The Black, so-called 'debit' companies had agents who went around door-to-door to collect from you. That's how we got our insurance.

It was primarily for burials. But today, African Americans prepare for retirement and investing, too. And [now] everybody wants us."

Insurance is a commission business. Trainees earn living allowances for three to six months. After that, they're expected to begin fending for themselves by "building a book," which means signing up customers. By this point, they're placed on a part-commission, part-allowance basis. The company might keep this arrangement for two to three years. After that, the salesperson will earn only commissions.

The most recent figures available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there were 415,000 insurance agents and brokers in the country. How much do they make? It depends upon what they sell. The average insurance agent with at least five years of experience who sells life, health, and disability insurance, and annuities, earns $67,433 a year. Even rookies who sell those lines average $52,232 a year, according to LIMRA International (formerly the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association) of Windsor, Connecticut. But agents who sell property & casualty insurance only bring in an average $15,000 a year after expenses. Many of these people are part-time salespeople, however. Another 100,000 insurance professionals work as underwriters, deciding whether applicants are acceptable risks. They make $25,000 to start and can get up to $61,000 if they become managers.

Wall Street-type Securities

African Americans make up less than six percent of the people who work in the securities business. "We have relatively few minorities and women applying," says Andrew Upton, a White manager who oversees diversity and affirmative action as well as employee relations for Prudential Securities in New York. But he and affirmative action officers from nine other Wall Street houses and banks now meet every three months to discuss how to increase their minority numbers. A group of 100 African-American employees at Pru known as Minority Interchange, as well as two in-house employee groups at Merrill Lynch with about 500 members, are helping facilitate training and promotions for professionals at those firms.

As in the insurance business, the crying need in securities is always for retail salespeople (or "stockbrokers," as they no longer like to be called). For example, Prudential, the fifth largest firm on Wall Street, hires about 1,000 new broker trainees a year. These usually aren't college grads, says Upton, because good brokers need to know more potential customers than average 22-year-olds have at their disposal.

Trainees spend long hours flogging the phones making "cold calls," unsolicited phone calls in which they offer to sell their services to possible customers. The other time is taken up with studying for the necessary Series 7 exam. All registered securities representatives must have this license.

"Brokers need sales experience," says Upton. "It's an ego-challenging occupation. You have to get used to getting hung up on, and being rejected." Casualties for this profession are high. Sixty percent of those who begin the two-year training program at Prudential drop out. That's a fairly typical failure rate. To begin, you'll start near minimum wage for three months, then move up to a guaranteed base pay plus a commission of between 20 percent to 35 percent on your sales.

In 1994, the average income for stockbrokers who sell to individuals was $117,037 per year, according to the Securities Industry Association.

Other doors to Wall Street careers include positions for research analysts, who start at $25,000 to $30,000 and can easily go up through the low six figures. Analysts look at the financial statements of companies whose stock is publicly-traded. On the bases of their findings they then make recommendations about whether their big customers should buy more of that stock since it's likely to go up in value, or whether to sell it off because it will probably go down.

Or you could pursue an investment banking function. If you were in public finance, you'd help a government agency raise money, perhaps to pay to build a school or a stadium. If you were in corporate finance, you could help companies sell their stocks or bonds to the public in exchange for giving customers a piece of ownership or an I.O.U.

But as a professor once said, "The person who knows 'how' will always have a job. The person who knows 'why' will always be his boss." John Utendahl turned that axiom on its ear. He went in search of a "why not." In 1992, after spending 12 years trading securities, he started an investment bank with backing from his previous employer, Merrill Lynch. Utendahl had spotted the trend toward more clients using minority brokerage firms because of affirmative action. But almost all of those emerging firms were involved in public finance, raising bonds for local or state governments. Utendahl, however, asked himself why not ramp up a shop that would specialize in corporate bonds and other so-called taxable securities.

Utendahl Capital Partners, L.P., has since become one of the leading African-American investment banks in this area. In three-and-a-half years, it has participated in 400 deals by putting together or selling $180 billion in mortgage-backed bonds, preferred stocks, etc. And Utendahl also operates a company that currently invests about $150 million for mostly institutional customers.

As prosperous as he has become through independence, Utendahl nevertheless recommends that college grads do a stint with an investment employer before trying to set up shop. Indeed, he worked at a bank, but opted to return to school to earn his MBA after he was dazzled by the sight of the frenetic, football field-sized trading floor at Salomon Brothers in New York City. Upon graduation from Columbia University's B-school, he jokes that he had a "high class problem," a number of investment banks, commercial banks, and accounting firms vying to hire him.

One of the most potent tools an applicant can add to his or her resume is an internship. The ideal situation is to work one or two summers while you're an undergrad or between your first and second years in grad school.

But don't let lack of an internship hold you back. Sam Austin III didn't. Austin couldn't intern between working on his MBA at Boston University. Yet when the Stock Market crash of 1987 slammed Wall Street, he put an intense networking campaign into gear. He says he read magazines, including THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, which reported about African Americans who worked in the business. By the time November of his last year rolled around, he began calling them as well as some of his school's alumni on Wall Street. "I'd take the train down there, at my own expense, and I'd meet them and ask them about their jobs. The idea was to a get people to talk about themselves," Austin says. "A lot of college students may feel intimidated about calling someone they don't know to ask for help in getting a job. But I had to."

Meanwhile, he dug hard into the books and loaded up on practical courses that exposed him to a general finance background. Austin took mergers and acquisitions, bond trading, commercial lending, global custody, and investment research. "That was a good substitute for not having worked a summer interning." Among other benefits, specific coursework allows you to pick up the lingo necessary for the field.

By graduation, Austin was choosing among three job offers, while fellow classmates were happy with one. Today, he's at Banker's Trust in New York managing and marketing part of an $84 billion portfolio for institutional customers such as pension funds. He also heads up the New York chapter of the African-American trade group for investment executives, the National Association of Securities Professionals.

He says that MBA students from top business schools should find Wall Street firms willing to pay $65,000 a year for their services.

We asked Austin for some of his most Machiavellian advice after eight tough years of navigating the career climb. "The only rule of thumb is that no one is managing your career but you," he offered. "Gain the skills you need, and gain the client contacts you need. Develop into what you want to be. Don't fit into a mold."

Banking

Banks are no longer the stuffed shirt, quiet-as-libraries institutions from your grandparents' era. (In the 1940's, and '50s, my grandmother, who lived on a farm, used to dress up and put on white gloves when she did her banking.) Today, it's fair to say that banks are everywhere, including in your home.

One barometer of this change is the epidemic of mergers that are taking place. According to Deloitte & Touche, by the year 2000, there may be as few as 50 major bank companies. At press time, Wells Fargo & Co., for instance, was circling over First Interstate Bancorp to pull the biggest hostile takeover in U.S. history. But Wells Fargo's strategy was not to keep open First Interstate's additional 457 branches in California. Instead, the company that made stagecoaches famous hoped to close down most of those offices, and even offered discount fees to customers who quit doing person-to-teller transactions.

ATM banking centers, supermarket mini-branches, at-home online computing, even bank debit cards...this is some of what banking has moved to. But the downsizing will also create more independent community-based banks. Thus, there'll be jobs around, but "I doubt you'll make the kind of big money that you make in the bigger banks right now," says Sheila Crawford. She's president of the National Association of Urban Bankers, a minority membership organization with 3,000 members in 51 cities.

Hot jobs? You name it: commercial lending (although few Blacks hold these positions), marketing, sales, client services. And as more banks blur the line between banking and the securities business, bankers can become more like stockbrokers. They're now going after "fee-based" lines of business such as selling mutual funds, and other securities investments.

What are not hot are staff support areas - human resources and accounting. When banks merge, these jobs become redundant. You'll be among the first to be let go. Crawford is naturally attuned to the computerization that's rocketing banking to the outer limits. In her own career, she's senior vice president and systems manager for The Boston Company, a subsidiary of the Mellon Bank Corporation. "Even bank CEO's have to understand and apply technology," she observes. Take classes, read industry publications, keep up with where the industry and its machinery is going.

Right-out-of-college applicants should expect to earn from the upper 20s to the low 30s. The hot jobs mentioned before can eventually pay into the six figures.

What About Now? What About School?

So how do you get into the world of high finance from where you're sitting now? We gave the assignment of answering that question to Dr. Billy Thornton, director of Clark Atlanta University's Academy of Finance. The Academy is a program within CAU's School of Business. With his PhD from Harvard in economics, Dr. Thornton not only teaches, but also consults investments businessmen on training employees, and improving profits. Here's his recipe for the perfect finance course load:

* Basic Math course

* Basic Computer Science course

* A minimum of two Accounting courses (Principles, Managerial)

* Two Corporate Finance courses

* Two Financial Statements Analysis courses

* (Optional) Courses in Personal Finance, Financial Institutions, International Finance

Dr. Thornton is big on internships if they're structured by defined objectives. Always ask to see whether the employer has any. It's nice when you're paid. But that's not the priority.

And Dr. Thornton advises you to join the student chapter of the professional organizations in your field. There are often two associations - a Black, and a majority-person trade group - for the same profession.

Surprisingly, he points out that writing is an important skill in a finance career. "Technical proficiency isn't enough if you can't communicate it to non-technical individuals," he explains.

But then, it's understandable that the new type of African-American financial professional will need to break down the intricacies of banking and Wall Street for the less sophisticated among us. After all, you're going to be the new civil rights movement.

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Gordon received a bachelor's degree from Hampton Institute and a master's degree from Illinois University. She completed her first year at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992 and has earned three insurance designations.

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