There is no shortage of finance degrees on Wall Street. What’s harder to find, according to Justin Nelson, is the person who actually knows how to use one.
Nelson is the Managing Director and Head of the Asset Management and Financial Principals Coverage Team for J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Connecticut, where he oversees a team of 20 professionals and more than $15 billion in client assets. He has spent nearly three decades in private banking, long enough to have a clear sense of what separates advisors who build durable practices from those who don’t.
“I think that having insight into how people think and emotional connection is so important in finance,” Nelson says. “When I’m out looking to hire people, I actually less interested in what your major is. I’m just looking for driven people who are interested in finance and wealth management”
The Field Doesn’t Test for What Matters Most
Finance education is built around technical competency. Candidates learn to build models, dissect balance sheets, and argue a stock pitch. What nobody grades you on is whether you can sit with a client who just lost a spouse, hold the discomfort of that conversation, and still give honest advice.
Nelson runs a practice where those moments are the whole job. Clients call on weekends. They reach out on holidays. The wealth they manage is what their clients’ families built over generations, and the anxiety that comes with that responsibility is real.
“People are very emotional about their personal money,” he says, “and so you get to know people really well.”
That observation is backed by data. A 2025 study by Wealthtender that analyzed more than 2,500 client reviews of financial advisors found that 89% of reviews center on relationship quality, planning advice, and emotional factors. Just one in 10 focused on investment performance or portfolio management. By that measure, technical acumen is not the primary thing clients are evaluating, and research suggests it probably never was.
A study of more than 700 U.S. financial advisors, referenced by Financial Planner Life, found a strong correlation between higher emotional intelligence scores and improved sales performance, client retention, and client referrals. The advisors who could manage their own emotions while accurately reading their clients’ tended to build better books.
What Nelson Looks for Instead
Nelson doesn’t screen candidates by GPA or school ranking. He watches how someone handles themselves in a room.
Psychology, he says, is the major he notices most among candidates who catch his eye. People who study human behavior come equipped with a way of seeing that serves the job. They’re curious about motivation. They’re comfortable with ambiguity. They don’t try to resolve an emotional conversation with a spreadsheet.
At J.P. Morgan, a firm that employs more than 40,000 technology professionals, the analytical infrastructure is already there. Nelson isn’t trying to add more computational firepower. He’s trying to find people who can use it in the service of a genuine relationship.
The Stakes Are Getting Higher
The financial services industry is approaching a generational shift in both its client base and its advisor workforce, and emotional intelligence is increasingly the variable that determines who survives the transition.
Nelson’s work has moved well beyond individual client relationships. The practice now spans entire families, including parents, adult children, foundations, and family offices, all with different risk tolerances, timelines, and ideas about what money is for.
“It’s not just about them,” he says. “It’s now about their kids and it’s about their families.”
Navigating that complexity requires more than financial literacy. It requires the ability to hold competing priorities across a family without taking sides, to recognize when a client is making an emotional decision before they do, and to build the kind of trust that outlasts any single market cycle.
A peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025 found that global emotional intelligence scores have been declining since the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend researchers called the “Emotional Recession” and linked to reduced employee engagement, higher burnout rates, and weakened organizational resilience. For an industry that runs almost entirely on relationship depth, that decline is a real risk for service quality.
For Justin Nelson, the finance curriculum gets candidates through the door. Hiring for genuine human connection is how he decides who stays.
