Kenneth Chavis IV

A free lecture posted on iTunes by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller convinced Kenneth Chavis IV to switch college majors from psychology to economics.

“I didn’t know any of these concepts or topics,” Chavis said. “I fell in love with the subject matter and wanted to learn more.”

He still wanted to help people, so his goal of being a therapist transitioned to providing them with tax strategies and optimizing investment portfolios.

After graduating in 2014, Chavis, now 30, started as an intern at Merrill Lynch. He later moved from his home state of Hawaii to Oregon, where he worked at a boutique multifamily office, catering to high-net-worth clients and business owners. There, he was the youngest on staff and the first Black advisor at the firm.

Based in Phoenix with his young family, he was most recently with Los Angeles-based LourdMurray, working as first or second chair with close to 90 clients, with a total of at least $350 million in assets under management.

In early May, he took a position as senior wealth counselor at Phoenix-based Versant Capital Management, which as of the end of 2022 had nearly $755 million in assets under management.

For the past several years, Chavis has worked with the Association of African American Financial Advisors, providing more than 40 pro bono financial planning sessions.

“An important emphasis of mine is to serve people who look like me,” he said. “It’s an important part of the work that I do and the impact that I want to have in the industry.

—Emile Hallez