Praemium Advice Leaders
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Praemium Advice Leaders
Accelerate and Elevate: Empowering financial journeys
Step into an inspiring conversation that explores the dynamic careers of women in financial advice. In this episode, we sit down with two industry trailblazers, Kate O’Callaghan of Shaw and Partners and Tahli Cavagnino of Kofkin Bond, as their share their unique journeys into financial planning. Their stories reflect not only personal growth but also the challenges women face while navigating this traditionally male-dominated industry.
As we celebrate International Women's Day, we delve into the critical theme of accelerating action for women in advice. Kate and Tahli explore how encouraging financial literacy, leveraging modern technology and creating pathways to a career in financial advice can address a more equitable gender balance in the industry over the coming decades.
This episode reveals insights about the increasing wealth of women and the demand for female advisors and the skill sets women bring to advice. We discuss the importance of building supportive networks, where women can uplift each other professionally, combating the narrative that financial advising is overly complicated—a misconception they aim to debunk.
Don’t miss this inspiring and motivating discussion!
Welcome to today's episode of the Praemium Advice Letters podcast. I'm Kylie Paton and today I'm delighted to be hosting two of our industry's leading women in advice to discuss some of the key themes for this year's International Women's Day. Joining us we have Kate O'Callaghan, state Manager at Shaw and Partners in Melbourne, and Tahli Cavagnino, financial Adviser at Kofkin Bond. Thank you for joining us today. Talking to you both prior to today's podcast, you both gave some interesting information about joining the industry and that maybe financial advice wasn't your first career choice, and that was probably more because it wasn't a well-known career path to take. So I'd really love to hear a bit more about how you both came into the industry. Tahli, if we can start with you, I'm really interested in how you began your career.
Tahli Cavagnino:Yeah, so I actually started my career in the fitness industry. I was really lucky early on in my 20s to have some really incredible mentors that helped me get my first job when I moved out of home from a small coastal town and moved up to Melbourne to the big smoke, and they helped me gradually kind of pave my way into a head office role, which I guess on paper was the perfect sort of job. I had a really incredible team. I had a great lifestyle that came with working full-time in fitness space. But yeah, something always felt like it was missing and I guess the more time I spent sitting down with studio owners and studio managers kind of talking about P and Ls, the more I realized that that definitely wasn't everyone's cup of tea. So I kind of found myself just scratching my head a bit about you know what it was that I wanted to do, In the background whilst I was working, I was chipping away at an undergraduate degree and, like most kids who I guess don't really know what they want to do, I was studying a Bachelor of Business and then I found myself really enjoying the economics and finance units and I guess, growing up in a small country town, I'd never had exposure to those spaces and I'd never had exposure to see how that could then translate into a job. So anyway, I was on my laptop one night and doing career quizzes in my 20s and I knew that I really loved, you know, building relationships and coaching people, but I also really loved working with numbers and building out strategies around financial concepts. So it turns out there's a perfect industry that blends the two and that's financial planning.
Tahli Cavagnino:So then COVID hit and obviously fitness industry, like many industries, was a little bit worse off, but that gave me an opportunity to go back to the books and do a graduate diploma in financial planning.
Tahli Cavagnino:As soon as I decided that I wanted to do that, I started reaching out and looking for a job in the space and was quite naive in that sense of wanting to get straight into into things. The first interview I actually had was with the team that I work with now, and that's Kofkin Bond, and the initial response was actually a no, do some further studies and come back to us once you've got a little bit more experience, which in hindsight was great. But I was quite persistent and continued trying to get a role in the space and again got really lucky with another great mentor who was actually a finance broker and she was running a small local practice in the area that I was living in at the time and helped me build a network in the space. And, long story short, I eventually got the job at Kofkin Bond and haven't looked back since.
Kylie Paton:Thanks for sharing, Kate, what was your experience.
Kate O'Callaghan:Mine was probably even more convoluted. I had started a Bachelor of Arts major in psychology at uni, because, of course, when you don't know what to do, you choose arts. I think that's the tick box. Didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up and I probably still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. But now that I'm 50, I'm probably already there and I did a year and a bit of the course and went. No, I need to do something else. So I packed up and went overseas for a year and travelled around Canada, the US, Italy and Greece. Came home, did a bit of temp work and went no, I'm still not ready to be serious. So I packed up again and went around Australia for a year with my twin sister and a couple of girlfriends and got back and went. I really need a job, I need money. I'm, you know, I was 22, 23.
Kate O'Callaghan:And there was an advertisement in the paper for bank tellers. At the time Westpac were taking over all the Bank of Melbourne branches. So I applied for the job, got the job, worked in that space for about 12 months and I worked my way up and one of the assistant managers at the branch went off to join Colonial First State as a bank teller because at that time they had bank branches and it was Colonial State Bank and she approached me to go across and be an assistant manager at a branch. And to do that, you had to do the first subject of the Diploma of Financial Planning and I'd never even heard of financial planning before then. And I did the subject and I absolutely loved it and I thought okay, these are my people, this is what I want to do. I want to help people understand that there are ways to save money, to budget, to understand your super and to create a healthy relationship with money. And that's how it happened. Yeah, and that was over 20 years ago, wow.
Kylie Paton:Yeah, so this year's International Women's Day theme is Accelerating Action. What do you think can be done to encourage more women to consider advice as a career?
Kate O'Callaghan:Sure, I think that just getting general knowledge out there that it is actually a career, that it is an option, is a huge step. And that comes all the way back to grassroots educating kids in primary school and high school about money. And there's a few small changes happening that I'm loving and I see with my kids where there's apps now where kids can get pocket money if they do jobs, they get X amount of pocket money and they learn the basics of budgeting. And there's apps now where you can round up, so if you're doing a purchase and you tap your card, you can round up and buy shares, and so there's little incremental digital change as well that's happening, which I think will make it well, it will accelerate the change. It'll literally get kids younger, enthused about their money and their finances and understanding budgeting and what it is to earn an income and how far your money goes and that sort of thing.
Tahli Cavagnino:So I think that's girls and boys, but it's critical I think it's even as controversial as they are influencers are at least creating a conversation that otherwise wouldn't have happened, particularly amongst a younger crowd. There's limitations and there's definitely downsides to what some influencers are putting out there, but there's definitely upside as well in terms of, creating a conversation and normalising it, because, yeah, for me, growing up, you know, we didn't speak about money at home and when we did speak about money, it was not in a positive way. So to have young kids excited about it, I think that's a step in the right direction.
Kate O'Callaghan:I love that, Tahli. I love that your experience was almost the reverse of mine, in that you started in a female-dominated industry and have somehow morphed into finance, and I think that is such an important story in the sense that we're not trapped. Like one thing, I think we put so much pressure on kids that when they're at high school, they have to pick a career and you can literally zigzag as long as you're given choices. And I think one of the great things we've got in Australia is that there's choices.
Kate O'Callaghan:And just because you do something for five years, ten years, doesn't mean it can't lead to something completely different. And I think encouraging our kids and young women, even old women, just to education, just to you know, build on what they already know constantly throughout their life, I think will, number one, forge better relationships between advisors and clients. Number two, it'll help grow wealth across the country in a myriad of ways, but it will also provide like strong educational background and strong growth in women and their children and their grandchildren coming through the generations, because it's just common we're all doing something. That's just so normal. It's so normal.
Tahli Cavagnino:We fall into things. It comes back to the accelerating progress as well with educating women and all people on how to make that career transition. I think that's part of the barrier to getting into advice is it is seemingly from the outside it's quite complicated how to become an advisor. Sure is and there's. You know there's different pathways to get into the space, but there's a lack of clarity around what they look like.
Kate O'Callaghan:And every two years the government decides to throw another curveball at us and change the you know the steps to get into the industry, you know, and that sort of. I think that will hopefully settle down. It is a profession now. When I started it was almost a hobby, you know, people did it and you could do one subject and be qualified to advise. We have come so far from that and again, at this whole pendulum swinging, we've gone the complete opposite direction and hopefully the pendulum's coming back to the middle where you know, yes, you need, of course you need good qualifications, of course you need you know continuous education, of course you need the right people in the industry, but you also need to be able to access all of that easily and understand what the pathways for education are. And I think we're sort of coming back into that middle place where it is much more available to more people. We just need to make sure that it's available to more women.
Tahli Cavagnino:Yeah, much more available to more people. Yeah, and I think it is already finding that sweet spot where it really isn't that complicated. It's just letting people know that if you've done an undergraduate degree, you probably will need to do a postgrad of some sort. But how does that differ from so many other professions? Right, like the majority of them do require that postgrad education piece. It's just that this historically wasn't a space where it was needed. So when it becomes suddenly a requirement, it's like oh, this is overwhelming, it's overregulated, but it's really not.
Kate O'Callaghan:No, it's not. It shouldn't be a barrier to entry to want to have the best and the brightest in this industry. It's a pretty demanding and tough industry and we want people who are, you know, who are willing to give it a go and work really hard, because it's really hard work and it is mentally challenging and it is. It can be like exhausting, but the rewards are huge. Equally, the rewards are huge. Like you help someone, you change their life.
Tahli Cavagnino:Yeah, it's incredibly rewarding.
Kylie Paton:Kate, you and I have been in the industry, probably about the same amount of time. So I remember going back to some industry events a few decades ago and being one of very few women in the room, if not in some cases the only. You and I both had blonde hair, so we would stand out. I had dark hair then. Oh okay, I've always had blonde, so anyway, we still would have stood out a lot.
Kylie Paton:I think we can probably acknowledge that we've made quite a bit of progress in increasing women in, finance roles. We've probably still got a fair way to go and just being able to have that real balance of men and women in the industry. But over your career, is there anything in particular that you think has helped with the gender balance or you think that would help in the future?
Kate O'Callaghan:Yeah, look, I think there's two things that come to mind. Number one is the push overall for STEM for women, particularly in high schools science, technology, engineering and maths. It was no such thing when I was at school, you know, you just did the subjects you chose to do. There was no thought process behind it. There was no drive to get girls focusing on math. Math equals finance. It's kind of this natural or more natural swing or getting women, little girls, women encouraged to learn more about finance by doing math in school. So there's that natural connection there which I think it will make a big difference in the future. We're still a long way away. I mean we're nowhere near 50% of the industry. I think 15% of women are advisors, or 15% of the advisor industry is women currently.
Kate O'Callaghan:One of the things that has helped which I have a love-hate relationship with from the big organizations is the forced gender balance. So when you're interviewing people, you have to interview the equal amount of males and females and if there's equal qualifications, you are encouraged to employ the person that you have the lowest amount of gender in, naturally. So if you've got a high woman female team, then you're encouraged to employ men, vice versa. That has actually driven more women to have an opportunity to be employed. Women, we shine. Once we're in the role we shine, I think
Kate O'Callaghan:ypically it's been really hard to get an interview Tahli that pendulum swinging completely the in the lead-up other actually helped a lot. I can see sort of coming back into the middle a little bit, because no woman wants to be in a job just because they're a woman. They want to be there because they are the best person and, variably, they are the best person for the role. We doubt ourselves. Yeah, we do. We absolutely doubt ourselves. And if it takes big organisations or even medium small organisations to take the leap and force that gender balance, then I'm okay with that until it actually does balance up. But we're clearly nowhere near that yet.
Kylie Paton:Yeah, yeah, we do have a long way to go. Yeah, tala, you shared with us in the lead up that you found it really valuable to foster those relationships or connections with other female advisors. Can you just share a little bit about how you're doing this and what's helped you with your professional growth?
Tahli Cavagnino:Yeah, absolutely. I guess I entered this space coming from what Kofkin a very heavily female-dominated world. I adviser not only in fitness industry but also in Pilates fitness industry, so I guess I took it for granted having a network of female colleagues that I caught up with on nearly a daily basis, both in and outside of work. So coming into the financial advice space, it was definitely a shock to the system and you know you talk about entering conferences and events and being the only female in the formalised room. I couldn't imagine what that felt like because it's still definitely biased towards male presence at those events. You know now we might have five females in the room, so it's getting there, but it's still a long way from, yeah, an even split.
Tahli Cavagnino:And I was quite lucky when I first started working with the Kofkan Bond team. There was a female advisor there who really took me under her wing and I met a few incredible women in the industry since I've started and having those sort of relationships has been really imperative to just feeling comfortable in the industry. So there's definitely a surplus of professional networking events and conferences. There are particular events for females in the space, but I find that from my experience a lot of those events have been really formalized and sometimes you can feel still a little bit stifled.
Tahli Cavagnino:So recently I started a quarterly dinner series for women in advice.
Tahli Cavagnino:It's called Her Table and it's just a chance for women in the industry to sit down together and talk shop.
Tahli Cavagnino:And I really wanted it to be more focused on like positive conversations about what we do in the job, because another aspect of our role that I think we battle with as women in the industry is that it's quite emotionally draining. You do invest a lot into your clients and sometimes I was finding I was trying not to come home and talk about it all the time because I think for those not in the industry it's hard to relate to two. So, yeah, her Table is really an initiative for us to get together on a regular basis and just chat about what we're working with and build a bit more of a support network and really encourage each other to grow our careers in the space, because there are still, even within the space there's a lot of different pathways you can take and sometimes you really just don't know where you can take advice. So, yeah, it's been a really incredible way to just gain some clarity in the space and just feel more supported.
Kylie Paton:Yeah, Kate, you've had a very impressive career working for some of our major Australian financial institutions. Where do you see the future of advisory roles and how can women position themselves to lead in these areas?
Kate O'Callaghan:Um, it's really. It's really interesting, I think. Um, like I've been pretty lucky, I've had quite a few female managers across the journey. Um, probably because a large chunk of my career has been in private banking, with large organisations, and banking typically is a, and private banking in particular is a very comfortable place for women to play, but not on the financial services side, admittedly, on the financial advice side, I think. I mean you look at the stats.
Kate O'Callaghan:There's a fantastic article in Forbes magazine that talks about the transition of wealth to women, and it's going to be over $30 trillion will transition to women around the world by 2030. And 94% of women want a relationship with a female financial advisor. So the stats speak for themselves. If we just keep it in numbers, more women are going to be seeking advice. They're going to want women to give them advice. Therefore, we need more women in the industry.
Kate O'Callaghan:So I think, organically, it's going to happen. It's going to be a natural transition. I think the STEM piece that I spoke about before, encouraging girls in schools to move into maths and maths-focused and business subjects there was no business subjects when I was at school. You couldn't do economics or accounting or, you know, not at my school. They're all available now and I think that natural, organic growth is going to happen and it's going to force the industry to change, and I think with that comes great opportunity for women in particular. We just have to be brave enough to take it, and I think that that's something perhaps that your mentoring group and your quarterly dinners can explore, because we need to be our own biggest advocates and our own biggest champions, and we're not typically good at that, but I think the opportunities will absolutely be there as more and more wealth transitions to women over the next five years. It's five years $30 trillion over five years.
Kylie Paton:Obviously, wealth of women is increasing, whether that is via wealth transfer or a lot of self-made Women are becoming the breadwinner in a lot of families now. So what shifts have you observed in women's confidence levels when it those major financial decisions?
Kate O'Callaghan:Tahli thoughts around that in more detail, I think women have been forced to make more financial decisions because divorce is through the roof and we're now I think it's 67% of relationships now end, whereas maybe 20 years ago you just stuck, or 30 years ago you just stuck in a relationship. So I think that has naturally forced women to take more control of their financial situation. I think because of that there's more women in the workforce and I think that they are huge catalysts for change for women. Women have had to be forced to become confident managing their own money because they haven't had anyone else to rely on anymore, and also, women live longer than men. So you are going to inherit at some point. You know the chances are, even if you are married, you are going to inherit your husband's wealth or your wealth. You're going to have to take control at some point. It's just happening sooner rather than later.
Kylie Paton:Yeah, tali, any additional comments on that?
Tahli Cavagnino:Yeah, I think it's really interesting seeing it play out with clients, seeing more young women engage with their personal finances, and they've definitely got a different approach to the financial planning process. They come in wanting to be educated rather than wanting to be told what is going to make them a lot of money. They want to be taken along that journey with you and it's more of a. I think it is a slower approach. That's needed when you're working with young women, because they want to understand what you're doing and how it aligns with what they want, rather than just look at a chart.
Tahli Cavagnino:Yeah, I think it's a very different approach and you even see it as you've kind of suggested. You know, with that wealth transfer later in life, women are inheriting an estate because typically they are living longer. But even those women, when they come into money, they're still wanting to take control of it at that stage and even at that point in life, asking so many more questions and really wanting to get engaged in the process and it's cool to see. It's really, yeah, it's quite uplifting, I think, to see.
Kate O'Callaghan:And it links directly back to that stat that 94% of women want to see a female advisor because we take the time and we ask questions and we take the process slowly and we're not after the kill and the investment, we're not after the end game. We tend to take the entire end-to-end financial planning process much more slowly and much more carefully. I think that's critical and really important for women who seek advice. They want their hands to be held. It doesn't matter how financially literate they are. They want their hands to be held through the process so they trust the process and I think trust in relationship and confidence in relationship is really important to females seeking advice.
Kylie Paton:So it's that education that's helping them build that confidence Correct, which they're probably getting more of that front, and maybe being more open to asking those questions with a female advisor.
Kate O'Callaghan:Yeah.
Tahli Cavagnino:Are there it's creating the space for it and just allowing them, yeah, space to ask the questions without judgment and feel empowered in that process.
Kylie Paton:Yeah. Is there any other insights that either of you ladies would like to provide?
Kate O'Callaghan:I would say don't yourself and just go for the role. I've never gone for a role that I actually thought I was qualified for, and you know the lead up to starting that role. And you're going oh my God, I can't believe I'm going to do this, I'm going to miserably fail and you don't, you don't. So just take the step. Take the step, Do it, Don't hesitate.
Kate O'Callaghan:They qualify for something like 50% yeah, Whereas women it's like 95%. If one thing, they're going, oh, I don't think I should do that, Whereas men go and do it.
Tahli Cavagnino:I'm going to nail it, yeah, yeah, and I think the beauty of advice, too, is that there's no one approach to it Like there's. There's such a diversity of ways that you can be an advisor and you don't need to be. You don't actually need to be an extrovert to be an advisor. There's so many different personality types that work well in the space, which I think opens up the box to so many different people to get into the industry, because they can find their niche, which is really cool, and I don't think you get that same opportunity in a lot of other areas.
Kylie Paton:Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think I would have probably gone down the advice path if I had have started later. For me, I thought I was too young. It's the same, the tick box thing. It's like you've got to be old, you've got to be male, you've got to have all these things that I just didn't have because I was this young girl straight out of school.
Kate O'Callaghan:said you know yeah, sure, yeah. Like it was hard. It was hard. I think we make it much easier now.
Kylie Paton:Well, thank you so much for joining us today, ladies. I've really enjoyed the conversation. It's been so inspirational and insightful, so really appreciate your time. Thanks, thanks again. Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you.
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