Edward Jones provides an individualized investment experience, serving over 8 million clients throughout North America. Penny Pennington, the CEO of Edward Jones, joined TheStreet to discuss the company's efforts to help people achieve their financial aspirations.
Full Video Transcript Below:
SARA SILVERSTEIN: I'm here with Penny Pennington, the managing partner of Edward Jones, which is the equivalent of a CEO. How is it running such a huge financial company?
PENNY PENNINGTON: Well, we're a partnership, so I work in partnership with 52,000 people to take care of 8 million clients, a trillion, eight of their assets that they allow us to care for, and their hopes and dreams for multiple generations of families all over North America. So it's why I wear this little chair on my lapel every day, because this is who we work for, those 8 million clients and their families trying to help them achieve possibilities in their lives that maybe they didn't even know where possible. But we help them achieve.
SARA SILVERSTEIN: And working with that many different investors. What do you learn about what are what's currently going on in investors minds?
PENNY PENNINGTON: Well, we learn a lot about their hopes and dreams. We learn a lot about their families because we work multi generationally with our clients. We work, we talk to them about your purpose. Like, why does all this matter? They want to talk to us about their health. We found out, strangely enough, and they want to talk about realizing the possibilities in their lives. What immediately becomes important in those conversations then, is sometimes the uncertainties of the market, which your audience is looking at right now as we think about those uncertainties. It's about interest rates, about what the Fed might do. It's about geopolitical uncertainties. It's about whether we're going to have a recession or not and how deep it's going to go. What's important about those conversations is that they fit into the context of someone's long term goals.
So they're very important for the impact that they can have on a plan. But what we work very hard to do is keep people focused on their long term plan, discover if there's something that needs to be shifted because of the impact that markets are having. So it's a very comprehensive kind of discussion that we have with our clients.
