How Quad-A is working to close the Black wealth gap

Just few months after taking the helm at the Association of African American Financial Advisors, Sheena Gray is already witnessing critical wins.

"We're almost at 3,000 for our advisor membership, and we're seeing over 8,000 [members] in our entire network to date," said Gray, who became CEO of AAAA in October after holding the role on an interim basis.

Previously, the association was led by Christian Nwasike, principal and executive managing partner at Practice Management Consultants.

By the end of December, Gray said AAAA had 23 corporate partners, including wirehouse giants Merrill, JPMorgan, Citi, and UBS. Taking its preexisting partners and last-quarter additions into account, she said 2024 proved to be a historic year.

That momentum is carrying over into 2025, Gray said, with 11 new partners onboarded in the first month alone. That includes a number of small RIAs that didn't have a history working with AAAA, otherwise known as Quad-A.

"It seems that the new branding of Quad-A and some of the work that we've done over the last months under my leadership has [beared fruit] with a lot of people in the industry," she said.

Over the last six months, the association reached out to current members and partners, as well as potential affiliates, to help shape its vision for 2025. From those conversations, Quad-A learned that many RIAs would like to become active partners but didn't know how.

"Some of those RIAs have sponsored firms that support Quad-A, and they just didn't know it. I think that was a huge miss," she said. "We'd have advisors reaching out to say, 'I want to be a partner,' and we'd say, 'You don't need to, because you work with this firm, and they're already a partner.'"

AAAA also lowered the barriers for smaller RIAs by easing the financial requirement for those firms with more limited access to capital, Gray said.

Looking further across the wealth space, she also sees a need to close the Black representation gap in the advisor population. With African Americans making up just 2 percent of CFP professionals across the US, she said Quad-A is focused on increasing its visibility and encouraging more financial professionals to join the profession.

"We don't see many young Black professionals wanting to be financial advisors. We need to make the job sexy again," she said. "The financial industry is not as attractive to the Black community, as it's not as widely known."

To address the issue, she said Quad-A is launcing a complimentary program to help Black students learn about the industry, which would go beyond historically Black colleges and universities to include predominantly white institutions. The association is also moving to help close the racial wealth gap with efforts to add more Black CFP professionals. 

While the association has made strides in supporting professional development for advisors and executives in the financial industry, Gray also sees an opportunity to enhance its presence in the Black community as a whole. With that in mind, she says Quad-A is working on wealth transfer education, mobilizing Black financial professionals to events geared toward African American families looking to build generational wealth.

"We're going to go around with client symposiums [to address] this great wealth transfer, preparing those Black families with intergenerational wealth management and helping them have strategies to minimize their tax burdens," she said.

Time and again, research has shown Black Americans face steeper financial challenges than other groups, largely due to gaps in wealth and income. And while there has been work to improve that over the years, Gray said there's more to be done to change the narrative for Black families.

"Dr. Martin Luther King once said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' And economic inequality is one of the greatest injustices of our time," Gray said. "Here at Quad-A, we're doing all we can to leverage financial empowerment as a form of social justice."