Falisha Mamdani maintains that change is the one constant in life in the current global investment climate. But riding out the storm is dependent upon how successful you are at earning the trust and confidence of your clients and your team mates. She is a Senior Vice President in Morgan Stanley Smith Barney’s Private Wealth Management division and a partner in the CML Group.

How did you get interested in managing money?
You could say that I just went into the “family business.” After studying at U.C. Berkeley and Harvard Business School, my maternal grandfather joined Wells Fargo as a private banker in San Francisco and Hawaii. After becoming head of the Middle East for American Express in the late 1970’s, my father founded a boutique investment bank in Bahrain. My cousin is also an investment banker. A Morgan Stanley “lifer,” he is currently Vice Chairman of MENA (Morgan Stanley’s business in the Middle East and North Africa).

Before pursuing a financial career, a lot of people major or minor in accounting or finance, or get an MBA. But you have a BA in French. How has that helped you become a stronger financial advisor?
You make an interesting point. Certainly I have made some unorthodox choices in my life. I ended up studying Francophone literature of the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Caribbean at Brown - not a traditional foundation for a career in the investment world.

From a very young age I have been and continue to be a prolific reader and a lover of stories. I think an important aspect behind our commitment to delivering bespoke solutions for our clients is driven by a view that each client’s story is unique.

You were born in Tanzania, raised in Bahrain, went to boarding school in the UK and on to college and ultimately settling in the US. How has your international background informed your career?
I learned to always keep a suitcase packed! My parents are from quite different backgrounds (India via East Africa and Northern California) and religious and ethnic traditions. Certainly, global geopolitical events (the expulsion of the Indian diaspora from Uganda in the early 1970’s; the outbreak of Civil War in Lebanon in 1975 that shifted the Gulf’s financial capital from Beirut to Bahrain) have profoundly affected the course of my own life. Ultimately, I have come to appreciate my international background and believe that it has added a valuable dimension in the advice we provide to our clients.

Talk a little bit about your time at AmericanExpress and what prompted you to move on.
Full disclosure: my father worked at AmEx before starting his own firm, so I did have a leg up and interned there the summer before my senior year. After vowing never to return, I ended up with a job offer and started working there three weeks after graduation. It was the early ‘90s, during a recession and AmEx was “re-engineering.” They’d reduce a team of seven to five, and you had to reapply for your job. I decided I would apply for the next higher job, not my own for the challenge of it. I figured the only downside was that I’d get severance and a chance to find what would be my ultimate career choice. As luck would have it, my strategy proved highly effective and I stayed 7 years and gained a husband in the process.

Maybe I wanted a change, maybe I just couldn’t see the next step for me at Amex, but in any case, a close family friend who was a veteran in the business serendipitously was looking for a junior partner. I went through the training program hoping we would end up working together. And we have ever since.

What has made the CML Group so successful?
In this business, there are single practitioners and there are teams. Obviously, I am a strong advocate for the team model. Sometimes two minds can add up to four. Together you can look to leverage strategic partnerships with people, whether they’re formalized or not. Now I have two partners and two senior client associates, and they bring even more experience.

On a personal level, working with a highly functional team leads to greater job satisfaction—and is a lot more fun!

Speaking of job satisfaction, what’s one part of your work that you find especially rewarding?
Our clients are not coming to us because they’re trying to create wealth. Typically, our clients have already done this and are coming to us to manage their wealth and the issues that come with that wealth over the long term. Our core client base are families, and they’re often intergenerational -- grandparents, children and grandchildren. We help them answer questions like how do they incentivize a young adult raised in an environment of affluence? What kind of legacy (human and financial capital) do they want to leave to their heirs? What do they want to accomplish as far as philanthropic endeavors? These are ongoing conversations.

This ongoing complexity of the everyday life of an UHNW (Ultra-High Net Worth) individual or family is what makes our relationships with our clients more rewarding for us certainly, but obviously primarily we hope for them.

What are some of your best practices in dealing with clients?
Get to know your client and help them understand what their real objectives are.

When you start a relationship with a financial advisor, its as personal as going to a new doctor. You change out of your clothes into a hospital gown and it may not be comfortable. But from a financial perspective, it’s a good analogy to how we focus on starting each relationship by talking inventory of your life: Insurance, wealth, advance estate planning, health care proxies, and liability management. We take it apart piece by piece.

We don’t have three or five investment solutions that we offer clients. Instead, we embrace open architecture and product agnosticism, because that’s what’s best for the client, period. We don’t believe that “one size fits all”, and so our approach is intensely customized.

What advice do you have for those starting their careers?
Seek out a mentor or mentors. When I started out there weren’t a lot of women in the business. I was lucky enough to find Nancy [Cooley] who became not only my mentor, but ultimately my partner and friend.

There’s a huge learning curve once the training program ends and the art and science of wealth management begin. This is a business where experience is always going to trump youth. This can also be a trying business because rejection is simply part of the job. Ultimately, while we have no control over global capital markets, we do have control over how we navigate through them. .

How have you been working through the current economic climate?
In this type of economic period, even on days when the market volatility literally makes me feel green I feel very grateful for the team of individuals I work with. Clients know that we have their best interests in mind. While they might have worries, they know that their worries are ours. We have discussed and dissected them and put plans in place to Address them.

Perhaps most importantly, our clients feel that we have extremely high standards for ourselves and we are truly committed to giving them the best possible advice and the highest levels of service. We take this very personally and I think it shows.