Maria Castillo Dominguez

Hispanic immigrants often arrive in the U.S. with assets and an investor mindset.

They’re prime candidates for financial planning and wealth management, if only American advisors knew how to reach them.

Maria Castillo Dominguez, 39, is making headway through advocacy and programs she has created and co-leads for the Financial Planning Association.

Her day job centers around women going through major life changes, especially divorce and widowhood. And that does integrate some of Dominguez’s own family and personal experience.

But it’s her work for and with new immigrants that touches on her own reason for settling in the U.S., and in Miami in particular.

Dominguez emigrated from Spain in 2010, thinking that her experience in banking would open career doors stateside. Instead, her native fluency in Spanish was only tapped occasionally at the wirehouse where she worked, and the enormous potential of the Hispanic market was not even on the firm’s radar. The stereotype that Hispanics work hard but struggle to achieve even middle-class status obscures the truth, she says: Hispanic professionals have plenty of money to invest and Hispanic entrepreneurs build wealth in plain sight.

Now, through the Latino Knowledge Circle, other planners hear first-hand how to serve and reach Hispanic clients. “There’s a lot of complexity to the planning,” Dominguez said. And besides, “sometimes you just want someone to talk with you in Spanish.”

—Joanne Cleaver