From war to Wall Street

Mubera Madar’s extraordinary journey from war-torn Sarajevo to a 25-year career at Charles Schwab is a testament to how individual determination and corporate innovation can shape destinies in unexpected ways.

Mubera was born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia), a city that was peaceful and thriving, in 1973. That same year, Charles “Chuck” Schwab, was starting a small brokerage firm with the ambitious goal of creating more access to the markets for individual investors. Thousands of miles apart, it was unforeseeable how their paths would one day converge.

From the start, Mubera had a global mindset. In 1984, she recalls the excitement of the Winter Olympics, which brought people from around the world to her city. “I remember seeing American athletes where I shopped for groceries,” she says. “I saw the whole world come together in the city of my birth.” 

In fourth grade, when Mubera began learning Russian in school, her parents made her switch classes, so she could instead learn English, what they believed was the language of the future of business—a fortuitous decision.

Mubera took easily to English, and as a teen she developed a keen interest in economics, reading everything she could get her hands on. But without any capital markets in her country, it was an impractical career path, so she followed her father into science. In 1992, she was about to graduate from high school with a focus in chemistry, when war broke out in Bosnia and changed everything for her.

With Sarajevo under siege, everyday life ground to a halt. Tragically, Mubera’s father suffered a spinal cord injury, and with no functioning hospitals, his situation was dire. In a dangerous airlift, the United Nations and the U.S. Air Force evacuated Mubera’s family to Phoenix, Arizona. There, doctors were able to stabilize him, though he was left a quadriplegic.

As the sole English-speaker in her family, Mubera became her family’s translator in the United States. And while they received a lot of support from the community, Mubera was also the only employable member of her family, and they eventually came to the harsh reality that she wouldn’t be able to provide the healthcare her father and her family needed. So, with the war coming to an end but still enduring, her parents made the hard decision to move back to Sarajevo, leaving Mubera the sole provider of her 12-year-old sister at age 21.

Despite the challenge of working, and caring for her sister, Mubera never lost sight of her passion for economics. In the United States she had access to more information, and she consumed financial publications like The Economist and the Financial Times and earned a degree in Business Management from Arizona State University. One day, she came across a job listing for Charles Schwab. The firm intrigued her, and she secured the last available interview spot. 

It was the year 2000 and Schwab was on the brink of launching the firm’s first-ever advisory service, Schwab Wealth Advisory™ in 2002. It was an important milestone for the company, and a bold move. In fact, it was this kind of pioneering spirit that resonated with Mubera—maybe it was because she had also gone on a bold journey of starting anew in the United States. 

“Sometimes you just know—it was big, and it felt that way,” says Mubera of her instant connection with Schwab and being part of Schwab Wealth Advisory. “I wanted to be part of something that was innovative and that was meeting the needs of clients in a unique Schwab kind of way.”

Now, 25 years later, Mubera hasn’t looked back. She’s gone on to get her CFP designation and her MBA from the Thunderbird School of International Management, fulfilling one of her life-long dreams of continuing to learn in an international setting among people with a global mindset. And while she’s had other roles at Schwab, she’s returned to the Schwab Wealth Advisory organization as a leader. She’s been with the company for half of its history, and also for half of her life. She calls it time well spent because she’s been able to help countless families plan their financial futures.

One of those families is her own. Today, Mubera is married and is raising two sons. And while their lives have already been much different than hers was growing up in Sarajevo, her eldest at 14 has already started his own Schwab journey. Thanks to his mother, he already has his own Schwab custodial brokerage account and is an avid student of the markets.