Katie Thompson once dreamed of being ‘Business Barbie.’ Now she advises the wealthy on their futures.

Her creatively named goal was established at a young age.

“I wanted to be Business Barbie,” says Katie Thompson. “I didn’t know what that meant, but I wanted to dress up. I wanted to make power moves.”

Thompson gets to do both in her job as a wealth management adviser for Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. She and her Merrill team, The STN Group & Associates, work at the high end, requiring a $500,000 minimum in managed assets. The average customer has about $3.5 million in assets.

Thompson this year was named top female wealth adviser in the state by Forbes, a spot she’s held for the past three years.

“It’s something my mom has definitely been proud of,” she says.

Thompson has been doing her job for 17 years, but wants to make sure her entire team gets credit because of how closely they work. Her particular niche, she says, is “working with people who are suddenly solo. That typically will be women who were recently widowed or divorced or going through some kind of transition.”

“It’s so fortunate in this business that you have the opportunity to be really connected with people.”

Thompson has seen tremendous change in her field through a time that has spanned the 2008 economic meltdown and the COVID-19 pandemic.

When she started, it was all about cold-calling to drum up clients; now, she spends time thinking about artificial intelligence and the ways her business will fundamentally change in the future.

“I think (AI) is going to replace certain aspects of our job, but I think we’re going to continue to be very, very important in our clients’ lives,” Thompson says.

What aspects of your career do you enjoy most?

Working with the clients and solving problems. That’s my first favorite part. My second favorite part is my ability to be a leader and to really think about the business, to evolve it, to be strategic about how our practice has gone from where it was to where it is now, and thinking about the future of financial services and how we’re going to stay extremely relevant in people’s lives.

What got you interested in this work?

To be honest, I really didn’t know so much about the financial industry, but as soon as I started talking, interviewing for different opportunities, it sounded really, really interesting. When I got into it, it was an opportunity to really help people, be creative and collaborate. I started with Smith Barney, which rolled into Morgan Stanley in the (2008) financial crisis. I started in 2006. I was 26 years old, trying to get people to trust me to manage their high-net-worth investments. And there was an age and gender thing, kind of this barrier.

How did you get around that?

I moved over to Merrill Lynch to work with my partner, Mike (Michael Stevens). And then the financial system collapsed. We really thrived in that environment because we kept picking up the phone to talk to the clients we were serving, holding their hands and helping them be assured that they were going to stay on track. I’m speaking with clients who have worked their entire lives and, like most Americans during that time, have lost a significant amount with really no knowledge of what was going to happen. And so to mature up and put myself in that position, I think, was a really big piece of the foundation of what has made me successful — that huge lesson in compassion and care and guidance.

Do you have any examples of a client you helped in a compassionate way?

Typically, it will be women who were recently widowed or divorced or going through some kind of transition. How broken they were emotionally from the loss of their husbands, but then also how out there they felt because they weren’t the person who handled the money. Their husband did. So they felt insecure. They didn’t feel empowered. Really, I took it as my duty to get these women in a position of feeling empowered and confident, and that things were going to be OK from a financial standpoint.

How do you view the financial volatility we’re seeing?

The market over the short term always responds to emotion, hence volatility. But the long-term trajectory shows you the picture of what’s happened, with two really important things — earnings of companies and the interest rate environment. We can’t predict what the markets are going to do. I’m optimistic about the long-term trajectory. We’ve been in this changing environment, but technology continues to really move things along. There’s a lot of exciting things that are happening right now that are being overshadowed by the political environment and the (trade) tariffs.

Can you give us some free financial advice?

The first one is, I think, you should always think of yourself as two different people. The “now you” and the “later you.” The “now you” has to do something to help the “later you.” When thinking about saving, we have to put a little aside for the later us. The second thing is that no matter how much you can save, just saving something in a regular cadence or whenever you can is so important and to invest it because if it’s sitting in cash, it is not going to help keep up with inflation.

What’s something few people know about you?

I think that people see me at this phase of my life and think that I’ve got it really together. “No. 1 Forbes, she is a managing partner.” But Business Barbie has insecurities, too. I’m just like everybody else. I think people who know me know I’m very down to earth. I love to make people laugh. I’m pretty open. Just like everybody else, I have some self-doubts. I have to work through that every single day. Also, I like to stitch like a grandmother.