Amerivet: Producing Meaningful Opportunities for Veterans with Mercedes Elias, Co-Chief Executive Officer, AmeriVet Securities.
SPEAKER
Mercedes Elias
Co-Chief Executive Officer
AmeriVet Securities
TIMESTAMPS
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mercedes Elias: (00:07)
Good morning. As I was preparing to come and speak today, I was talking to my team and I was thinking about the last time that I spoke to an audience about this size. I was actually about to brief a battalion of Marines, we were getting ready to go to combat in Afghanistan. I actually helped them set up their will in powers of attorney. And I was basically making sure that Marines didn't sign over the power of attorney to the stripper they met last weekend. But like Rachel said, my name is Mercedes Elias. I'm the co-CEO of AmeriVet Securities. We are a broker dealer that underwrites for transactions in the debt capital markets, equity capital markets, and public finance.
Mercedes Elias: (00:49)
Now, when we set up our firm as a service disabled veteran owned broker dealer, we had this thesis that if we were going to ask our constituents to be diversity inclusive and kind of support those initiatives, then we need to support our constituents as well. If you look at the makeup of our firm, we stand at about 55% military veterans, 35% minorities, and we actually have 15% women veterans. We actually take military veterans as they get off of active duty, we train them through our internship program, which we run throughout the year. So we have the traditional summer program like most of the big banks have, but we also have a spring program and a fall program.
Mercedes Elias: (01:30)
In that program, the majority of the time, we are giving these veterans their first chance, not only in corporate America but in finance. So we're taking them from the military, teaching them about that transition because of half of us that have served actually know what that's like and what that entails, and then we have the guys from Wall Street that have 20, 30 plus years experience mentoring these veterans and teaching them about different career paths and different kind of financial services roles.
Mercedes Elias: (01:57)
Now, we're a smaller firm and unlike the bigger banks we can't hire all the veterans that we train. But what we do do is help launch them and get them into the big banks. 50% of the interns that have come through our program have actually succeeded in getting full-time employment at places like Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others. The other 50% just happens to still be in school, either finishing their undergrad or pursuing their MBA at top colleges like Harvard and NYU.
Mercedes Elias: (02:24)
Outside of training veterans that want to get into finance. We actually do a considerable amount of work in the veteran community, working hand in hand with nonprofits that are supporting veterans, and we wanted to do a little bit more than write a check for $10,000, take a picture and shake hands. We wanted to see what are the nonprofits doing to help support veterans? How can we let the veterans know about the resources that are out there for them? So we work with these nonprofits to help them achieve their mission and at the same time help the veteran community.
Mercedes Elias: (02:54)
So, to kind of put it in perspective for you. We work with an organization called the Gary Sinise Foundation. If you know Gary Sinise he played Lieutenant Dan in Forest Gump. He does a considerable amount of work to take care of surviving spouses and children whose husband, mother, son, daughter, has been killed an active duty. We've hosted family members for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Recently this summer we actually hosted an event for about 24 surviving spouses with a resiliency retreat to help them work through their grief and their loss.
Mercedes Elias: (03:23)
We've worked with another organization called Achilles International that helps adaptive sports athletes. So these are veterans who lost dilemma, they're learning how to work with their prosthetic. And they're finding purpose in kind of working to basically rebuild their lives and meeting other people that are doing so as well.
Mercedes Elias: (03:42)
So, over the course of the past few days, you've been hearing things like ESG initiatives, social impact, and you might be wondering how you can help and how you can contribute. By utilizing a firm like AmeriVet you can see very tangible results about how utilizing us creates this ripple to continue to support the veteran community. If you'd like to read more about us or just kind of about our capabilities, you can visit us at AmeriVetsecurities.com. Thank you very much.