Building a Steady Pipeline of Incoming Advisor Talent, Featuring BISA President Jane‑ellen Porter

In this episode of the BISA Portfolio Podcast, guest host Heather Broderick of LPL sits down with new BISA President Jane‑ellen Porter of Wilmington Advisors at M&T to discuss building the next generation of advisor talent — and why solving the talent gap is business‑critical for institutions today. Recorded live at the BISA Annual Conference in Tampa, their conversation explores how intentional development, mentorship,and inclusion can secure both client outcomes and firm growth for years to come.

Tune in to learn:

• Why the aging advisor population and the coming great wealth transfer make a proactive talent strategy essential to retaining clients and assets.
• The core qualities Jane‑ellen looks for in advisor candidates — beyond credentials — including passion for helping people, work ethic and the ability to pass key licensing exams.
• How a structured 18-24 month development pathway, with sales managers as managers and seasoned advisors as mentors, can successfully grow juniors into high‑producing financial advisors.
• How BISA’s Rising Stars program and the work of the Impact and Vision Committee are helping attract women and underrepresented professionals into advisory, operations and compliance roles — and why investing in younger talent now creates “lifers” who will shape the future of the industry.

BISA is the leading financial services industry association dedicated to serving those responsible for the marketing, sales and distribution of securities, insurance and other financial products and advisory services through the bank channel. 

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Transcript

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Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of The BISA Portfolio Podcast recorded live here at the Annual Conference in Tampa. I'm Heather Broderick, member of the BISA Content Advisory Committee and guest host for this episode, having the pleasure of interviewing new BISA president, Jane-ellen Porter. For those of you who don't know me, I lead national accounts for institutions at LPL. Before we get started, I want to encourage you to please subscribe to this podcast on the app you're listening to now, and if you enjoyed it, please share it with your network. Jane-ellen, can you give us a quick introduction? Thanks, Heather. My name is Jane-ellen Porter. I'm the regional sales manager at Wilmington Advisors at M&T, as well as a market leader for the Northeast market at M&T, I have the pleasure to work with Heather and her team at LPL. I am, as Heather mentioned, also the new BISApPresident effective this afternoon; we'll have a little baton passing. So really, really exciting to take that on and to continue the great work that our previous leadership has put in place for us to continue to grow as an organization. So thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here. So Jane-ellen, I know taking over as president of BISA is a huge responsibility, and I'm so excited to hear more about your vision and strategy, but today we're going to be talking a little bit more about what you do in your day job at M&T, and I know that you have been a huge advocate and very dedicated to ensuring new career engines come into the financial services industry. Can you tell us a little bit about why this is so important to you and why you see this as a critical priority? Yeah, I am very, very passionate about bringing new advisors into our industry for many reasons. One, I think that this is such an amazing career for all people, and, you know, especially for folks who love to help people. We make such a difference in our clients' lives and help them meet their hopes and dreams. That's first and foremost. Second of all, when I think about the industry as a whole, our advisors are aging, and many are going to be retiring within the next five to 10 years, and they have worked so incredibly hard, along with the institutions, to bring these clients in. What are we going to do to continue to service those clients so they remain our clients? That's where bringing in new talent and having them work with these incredible advisors that have been in the industry for so long as mentors, having them partner together and then have a smooth transition for clients is really what I envision. That is the best way for our clients to be able to continue with their goals, their planning in order to meet their overall financial goals. So really important for us to grasp, for lack of a better way of saying, the younger generation to get into our business. I love that. It's such a worthy cause, and I know that you've been very proactive about making sure that you have a steady pipeline of new incoming talent. On the reverse of that, What risks do you see institutions having to mitigate if they don't address this talent gap as proactively as you have? Yeah, well, we risk losing those clients or not having those clients meet the goals that we plan for them, right? And we're not going to have the people lined up with the clients in order to help them. It's happening, right, when we think about the great wealth transfer. That's new opportunity that we have in a lot of ways, but it's also the money that we already have within those older generations, and without additional talent to help that younger generation, we will not capture any of that. We're going to lose assets. I think that's that's a big"watch out," definitely, that people want to get ahead of. So when they're thinking about talent in their pipeline, talent in their network, right? I think bringing new entrants in means that they are not interfacing with experienced producers. They're literally identifying people who would make a good advisor. So when you're thinking about these qualities that they should look for, what qualities do you signal someone who could be a great candidate to be an advisor, regardless of their prior experience? Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because as time has gone on, as I've been in the industry, that's kind of changed. We used to look at talent as, folks come, when I was looking at a resume for a sales assistant or a junior advisor. I mean, what is their passion? Do they love working with people? Are they hard working? It wasn't necessarily, you know, I know what an investment is, or I know what an insurance policy is. They knew the basics, but it was about the person, and whether or not we felt that they would be a fit for working with clients. And things have changed, right? There's college degrees now that are in financial planning, right, in advisory, and I think people think, "Well, those are the candidates that we want." Yes, in some cases, but just because you're the college degree in that doesn't mean necessarily that you have those basic fundamental skills of loving to work with people. So I think going back to finding out what people's passion is when we're interviewing and bringing it in, that's one. Two is if you're bringing in more of junior advisors, whether it's through your program or from outside, can they pass the exams? Very important, right? Can't be in this industry without that. The SIE has helped that significantly. We all were hiring people who may have 3.8, 4.0 GPAs coming out of college, and they can pass the series seven. So the SIE has helped with that significantly, so that we can see if people put in the time and the investment into themselves and if they're able to pass the exam. So you know, as I think about those pieces, those are the fundamental pieces when it comes to finding the right people. A lot of the best candidates that I've had over the years were referred by people, either clients, advisors or people within the bank branches, which was great, because they knew them as people, and that's where we had to begin. I love that. So let's say you get this new advisor, or new potential advisor identified, and they join M&T, what does an effective development pathway look like for them? Maybe for you as well as for some of the listeners at other programs. Sure. So in my, you know, previous years, I did have a pretty strong junior program. Some of those advisors are still with us to this day, and very big producers. And the way that we looked at it was twofold. One, don't expect your FAs to manage their junior advisors or their advisors in training, because they're not good managers. Let's put it there. So we have the sales managers as the manager, the positioning for the financial advisor was the mentor and the coach. So we put together a three part plan. So it was what is the responsibility of the advisor and training? What is responsibility of the financial advisor, and what's the responsibility of the regional sales manager? It was a, you know, three-legged approach, and all had to work together and communicate during this 18 to 24 month training period. Licensing was very important. In today's world, we have to pay folks while they're getting licensed, which is very different than when I was handed my books and told never to open them at work. That was a long time ago. So the first nine to 12 months are actually set up for studying and letting the folks get their licenses while being more of an admin. So they're learning the business from the inside out, which is incredibly important right for them to understand the operational piece, and they can't sell at that point anyway. After those 12 months, then they have the licensing that they need, hopefully, and then they can start learning the product and the solution and the processes to be an FA, and that's where the more senior financial advisor comes in. And like I said, it has to be twofold, and that relationship between the FA, the more senior person, and the advisor in training, has to be solid. I love that you get the community of advisors involved in that. That's fantastic. And speaking of community, I know that prior to being president, you work with BISA as the board lliaison for what was formerly known as the DE&I Committee. So what strategies did you observe were helping to attract women and other underrepresented groups into these roles? Yeah, quite a few years ago., this was before we had a DEI Committee. The board recognized that we were going to be in a struggling spot within the industry to bring in younger generation. And we had the board at the time give a lump sum of money for us to be able to go out and work with smaller institutions that perhaps did not have the funds for this to support CFPs and licensing that actually then ended up morphing into the beginnings of the DEI Committee. Through the committee, which is now the Impact and Vision Committee, we spend a lot of time, a lot of effort in our Rising Stars program, and that is identifying the rising stars within all of our members for a two year program where they work together, they hear about what's happening, you know, with other institutions and working together towards a common goal, which is a capstone project that they are phenomenal at. And we have that Rising Star Program nomination going every single year. Today on stage, we got to see this year's class. I mean, it's just so awesome to see this and then the previous year's classes there as well. Well, we as institutions need to do that as well. We need to identify what that group is, and standing on that stage today, there were financial advisors, there were sales assistants, there were operations and compliance folks, because we need the younger generation across all areas of our business. So really taking the time to invest in that generation, which isn't easy. We heard today, right? The average time that the younger generation stays with a company is three years. We'd like it to be longer than that. So how are you create these programs and letting them know what that end game is? We want to create lifers in our programs so that takes a lot of work and an investment from the organization. I love that. So Jane-ellen, I feel so lucky to be sitting here across from you, and just for the benefit of our listeners, I can actually feel the passion radiating off of you that you have for this topic. What excites you the most about the future of advisor talent? What excites me the most is how we well, first of all, everybody in this room has been through so much over the years, with the economy, with, you know, M&As, with seeing the changing of being a broker, right? Because that's where we all started, too, being full on financial advisors and financial planners. Watching that evolution so far really excites me to what the future is going to bring. We're now bringing folks in who are open to that. That is the way that we do business, that we're leading with planning, as opposed to taking our wonderful financial advisors who have been doing this a very long time, and trying to get them to change their processes. And what I've seen is some of this new talent coming in is changing the Please subscribe via the app or wherever you get your podcasts, behavior of our advisors who have been here a long time. So I'm so excited to see the growth, continued growth. We and if you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. were at a pause, right? Actually, the number of financial advisors has been dropping in the industry as a whole, and we were at a pause. And to really be influential to bring the younger generation is something that really, really, really excites me. Can you tell?