Modernizing Wall Street: Anne Clarke Wolff, CEO Of Independence Point Advisors

Independence Point Advisors (IPA) is the first female-owned investment bank and C-Suite advisory on Wall Street. Anne Clarke Wolff founded IPA in November 2021 after spending 30 years in global leadership positions with organizations such as BofA and JPMorgan Chase, aiming to increase effective problem-solving for clients through diversifying Wall Street.

We recently spoke about her vision, challenges and results.

Karen Walker: What was the problem that you set out to solve?

Anne Clarke Wolff: I started my career in investment banking at Salomon Brothers in 1989. And believe it or not, there were more women in my class at Salomon in 1989 and more female managing directors in 1989 than in 2020.

Without women at the table, I thought clients were missing an essential, different set of voices when they're confronting some of the most complex challenges that they've ever encountered.

As I progressed in my career, I wanted to see Wall Street become much more diverse.

Walker: I’m an engineer by degree and was the first and only woman in many of my classes at a traditional all-male school. It astounds me that here we are in 2022 and we are still having that diversity conversation.

Clarke Wolff: Women now represent 57% of college students and 57% of the workforce. How do we pull that talent through and profile it in helping solve so many of the world's biggest problems?

Walker: Yes, pull it through and retain it, all in the service of cognitive diversity. So, who and how have you hired to create this broadly diverse organization?

Clarke Wolff: I set out first and foremost to hire exceptional talent. Clients may be very sympathetic and responsive to the notion of diversity, but at the end of the day, if you think you need a brain surgeon, you're going to hire the best brain surgeon.

To be diverse on Wall Street and to survive and advance in your career, in my opinion, you must be exceptional. In many cases, people on Wall Street have been in a narrow swim lane doing the same thing for the past ten years. The angle I took was: Are you ready for three things? First, would you like a career with more aperture?

I then appealed to the notion of collaboration. How do you bring different people together and let them experience the excitement of leveraging each other?

The third element was transparency. We have a transparent model, and we want that to be something that encourages people who love providing clients with advice and want to bet on themselves. This is an industry that attracts people who are willing to work hard, but who also want to enjoy the benefits of that hard work.

You need to meet talent where they are. We appreciate geographic flexibility. Our team is across the country. At the same time, while I am very sympathetic to – and would love to have - a team that all sat in the same office as we used to in the old days, I think it's the old days.

Walker: We are at an inflection point - not a moment in time, but a transition period when things are changing. Part of my pandemic lockdown reading was The House of Morgan and there hasn't been much innovation in the field until very recently.

Clarke Wolff: The last innovation I can think of in investment banking was Excel in 1990. I keep reminding myself that while trying to drive change is uncomfortable, this is an exciting moment to try to modernize this industry. I think that this notion of a remote workforce is going to be critical.

Another area of modernization: half of our team are experts in ESG, cybersecurity, public policy and human capital. These are all topics grappled with by every single company I know.

We hope that those current topics like ESG or cybersecurity would give us a way to complement almost any other advisor that a company would want to use. I don't think that we're going out-smart or out-resource Morgan Stanley's XYZ group or Goldman Sachs's ABC group.

If you’re a high-growth company, you haven't thought about topics like ESG until you must do it under a deadline. One of our competitive advantages is that we want to work with companies 18 to 24 months before an exit - to help them think about those goals, set them up, measure and document them.

Walker: What has the reception been to IPA, and what kind of results have you seen?

Clarke Wolff: It's incredibly humbling and gratifying. When I present at meetings or conferences, people are cheering, which is like, “Wow.” We cover companies from late-stage growth all the way to the largest companies in the world. We've been very fortunate to have been invited into a first few transactions that have played to some of the themes I've mentioned.

For example, we're working with a female founder who's selling her company. This assignment was a perfect fit to leverage our alliance with Lazard. Now this founder has the benefit of both a very talented team at IPA and an industry-specific team at Lazard.

We're working on some capital raises for companies with a solid ESG orientation. I think these founders feel very aligned with what we're trying to do.

We want to help as many clients as possible in capital raising, whether it's private or investment-grade bonds, or hopefully, a reopening of the IPO market as we get into the fall.

I'm excited that, hopefully, one of the opportunities in a challenging equity market will be a pivot to M&A. I do think that once companies get their feet underneath this market and this world, there will be real opportunities to take advantage of that.

Walker: When you have a cognitively diverse group, you have fewer blind spots. It's just the way it is. But you must create an environment where these things are possible, where people feel safe to disagree and to bring up their diverse opinions. I'm curious, do you have leadership principles or tenets that you have developed?

Clarke Wolff: I do, and to be candid, I'm having to challenge them because it's very different managing a team that is 80% diverse with a lot of remote elements. I'm a disciple of Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan Chase) on the power of business reviews, measuring what you want to change, and understanding how you drive performance. I'm just starting to try to figure out what the IPA version is of that.

If you hire great people and you inspire them, what you're doing has the potential to change the world.

Walker: The tagline for my business is “up and to the right” because that is the spot on the two-by-two matrix where we always want to be.

Was there a moment in your career, a seminal moment when you knew that you were moving in the right direction?

Clarke Wolff: My daughter is 21 and one of her friends is just starting her career at one of the big banks. And she was talking about feeling like an imposter. I said, “Honey, I feel like I have imposter syndrome for hours every day of every week. And I've been doing this a long time.”

I think there are very few people who live comfortably in that notion! But when I pivoted to leading a huge group of people, I realized that I had to lead differently. I saw when my points resonated with an audience and inspired them. When I can see that people are inspired and that it's going to allow them to bring their authentic selves to work and achieve things that they never knew were possible, that’s my upper right moment.

I'm hopeful that’s possible in the case of IPA. Of course, I want us to be enormously financially successful. I want to have a million delighted clients, but I think that those satisfied clients are going to drive demand for this diverse advisor. I would love to have the legacy that because the clients had such a great experience, that created the demand and the pull-through.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.