UBS and Morgan Stanley, two wirehouses with divisions catering to the famous and athletic, are coming to TV and movie screens in a growing bid for attention from diverse potential clients.
On Sept. 13, UBS
UBS also announced the second season of
Around the same time, on Sept. 12 Morgan Stanley sponsored an advance screening of "The Woman King," a historical drama featuring the Oscar-winning Viola Davis as the head of an African group of all-female warriors. A cocktail reception preceded the New York City-based event. Following the screening, guests were treated to a live Q&A with director Gina Prince-Bythewood and actress Thusu Mbedu, who plays a young female warrior in the film.
The moves are creative ways for the two firms to not only promote their services to more athletes and entertainers, but also deepen relationships with clients and prospective clients in the Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and other minority communities, which have long been underserved by the wealth industry but often identify with the stars in these productions.
'Cultural conversations' to deepen wealth relationships
Richards, who also leads the Segment Sales & Engagement division of the firm's wealth management business, said events like the "Woman King" screening can generate insightful conversations between clients and advisors who often attend them together, in the case of "Woman King" sitting side-by-side in the audience, and debrief afterward.
"It allows us to get more information from the clients and understand more of what they value, what they appreciate," Richards said these events, which can open clients up to sharing about their family history and how they want to approach topics like charitable giving and estate planning. "What do they want their legacy to be? And what do they want their story to be?"
"The Woman King" dramatizes similar questions of legacy and intergenerational leadership in the context of shared ancestral culture for many of the viewers. At the screening, the almost all-Black cast of "The Woman King" and its all-Black panel, which delivered an emotional commentary on the film's production highs and lows, elicited cheers and Zulu-imitating cries from the mostly Black audience, who were moved learning of the film's historical basis in a real female warrior group in the West African kingdom of Dahomey.
The growing leadership of women and especially Black women in creating wealth for their communities helps Morgan Stanley resonate with that segment in particular through this event, Richards said.
By fitting into the client's bigger life story through these experiences, the wealth advisors become closer to clients and more aligned with their financial narrative and even identity, Richards said. "It's important for us to show up in these cultural moments, have these cultural conversations."
"We're also looking to be educated as well, because we're not going to profess to say we know everything about each culture, each gender segment," Richards said of the firm's effort to grow its outreach. "But the fact is that we're putting ourselves in a position to say, well, we want to partner and we want to learn."
The firm is looking into esports as a growth area for further outreach, Richards said. "There's a lot of women participating in this space and a lot of diverse segments that are participating." She added that Morgan Stanley would maintain a focus on financial literacy in its outreach to targeted segments, to help a rising star "continue along in your career and be able to enjoy yourself but at the same time, fulfill what you want your purpose in life to be."
The Global Sports & Entertainment division, a unit at Morgan Stanley that began in
The relationship with AAFCA had already been going strong for several years. "Many of our relationships have been pretty long-term, and they start out with something as small as sponsoring the table at a dinner or a gala. And then we have the conversation, and it evolves over time. We end up creating special experiences" together like screenings or literary brunches, she said.
Marketing has also become more subtle and ESG-based in the past few years across
"Today's client is looking for more than just someone managing their investments. They want organizations to tap into the human relationship side of things," Ted Reid, senior vice president and director of Morgan Stanley's Global Sports and Entertainment Division, said in an email statement.
Reid, who is also a wealth advisor, added that the firm "has consistently been connecting its image with events and organizations that are meaningful to our clients, allowing us to stay top of mind while displaying our commitment to diversity and inclusion. Your brand is everything, and if you don't actively shape your narrative, someone else will."
'We need the bigger, more reputable firms'
Following last summer's
"I think the amount of money that athletes were making, even when I was playing, was good, but wasn't to the point that firms felt like it was good for the balance sheets to get involved," Ogunleye said in an interview, adding that up to now he's seen relatively less interest from Wall Street in building relationships with individuals in this occupation. "But if you're seeing the amount of wealth that entertainers are able to make now in 2023, this is a great place to be.
"I actually wish I was young again. I could play and sign a new contract and I wouldn't be here," he joked.
Today, at UBS Ogunleye is head of sports and entertainment, a newly created division that launched in late 2020. George Foreman and Magic Johnson were the only sports entrepreneurs that Ogunleye was aware of when he was starting out two decades ago, but with the growth of influencer culture on social media today, "you don't have to be a future hall-of-famer to have an amazing business acumen," he said.
For Ogunleye, the UBS shows reflect an important change in the wealth industry that he hopes UBS can lead:
"There's too many unsavory characters in this space. We need the bigger, more reputable firms relating to our clients."
He isn't concerned about other wirehouses copycatting his methods or marketing to his client base, in that regard. The more the merrier. "Knowing that the industry itself is following and copying [us], and knowing that even if you're not at UBS, that you've found someone that can touch on everything that we've done — I'm definitely okay with that," Ogunleye said.
Thomas Carroll, a former financial advisor and president at RIA Homrich Berg in Atlanta who oversees advisor work with clients in the entertainment and sports industries, agrees that while there are plenty of advisors eager to serve them, there may be less high-quality advisors available.
"Unfortunately, that client base is more prone to being taken advantage of by advisors who aren't looking out for the client's best interest," Carroll said in an interview. "So it's really important that a client do a tremendous amount of background work and reference checks and the full due diligence that you would do before making that really important decision. Because oftentimes, a client [in] that space is very, very busy. They don't have time to oversee the day to day of their financial life."
'Make it more modern'
Ross Mac, a former Morgan Stanley employee himself who is now a REVOLT TV creator and hip hop artist, also believes the path to success for these clients, who often come from diverse backgrounds without access to models of healthy wealth, involves the television screen. Mac featured as a financial coach to young NFL player Jalen "Teez" Tabor in a Netflix documentary last month about financial education, "Get Smart with Money."
"I genuinely look at financial literacy as a language. It's kind of like English. So if you look at financial literacy as a language, you realize the earlier you start speaking it, the more likely you will become fluent in it," Mac said, adding that he focuses in particular on the Black community and helping build intergenerational wealth in much of his content. In his personal life, Mac's daughter just turned two recently and he talks money with her in the car every morning. "We're talking about investing. We're talking about credit scores and life insurance and the entire gamut, just generally about financial literacy."
Mac said he appreciated efforts by firms like UBS to engage in such financial literacy initiatives, though he hadn't previously heard of the UBS shows. "There are a lot of horror stories of athletes and entertainers who got a lot of money and went broke." The same basic skills needed to manage $1,000 apply to managing millions, he said. "It's all about controlling inflows and outflows." But to teach these skills, advisors need to get creative about their
"Since the beginning of time, financial advisors and Wall Street have been an old white man's game," Mac said, noting that with many popular sports, the professionals tend to be people of color or those from less wealthy backgrounds without a background in finance. "We're talking baseball — young, Hispanic — and we're talking basketball, football — young, African American — hockey — young, white — depends what we're talking about, but the commonality is young people who are thrust into making a lot of money out of nowhere… I think (what) UBS is trying to do is just make it more approachable, make it more modern."
He added that getting in early with athletes while they're still in college could become quite lucrative for firms, but it takes meeting them where the current generation is: often, on social media or through easily digestible and engaging video content.
"It's just, how do you better market to them, and I think that's what they're doing," he said of UBS and Morgan Stanley's entertainment-based outreach strategies.
It's equally important to change the public narrative around how these professionals are perceived, Ogunleye said. "We want to get away from any of our clients having the unfortunate headlines of having to go bankrupt or file for bankruptcy. But when it comes to athletes, and especially entertainers, those become magnified within the media."
