The Wealth Management Digest

Transcript: Welcome to this week’s Wealth Management Digest.

The one item worth mentioning for this past week when it comes to industry highlights is Cerulli’s report called “The Evolving Future of Wealth Management.” Over the last year, they interviewed over 11,000 households with over $250,000 of investable assets. Definitely worth checking out. One data point caught my attention: the number of advised investors, individual investors, has increased from 35% to 47% when you look at the time frame from 2009 to today. When you look at the self-directed individuals, the percentage has dropped from 41% to 24%. So, it dispels this view that consumers don’t want human financial advice; they want to do it themselves. No, in fact, there’s more demand for it now. As technology operational efficiency allows advisors to serve a broader population set, there will be even more demand for it. Because now they can see that they can actually get the service. Now, that also means that these separate reports we’ve seen over the last couple of years, there’s been better pricing power for advisors, meaning they’ve been able to hold the line on their pricing. But consumers do expect more for that price. Financial planning, estate planning, tax planning, etc, rather than just picking stocks like in the old days. So, the good news is consumers want what you have, and that’s not going away. There seems to be more of them wanting a human advisor, but they expect more than they used to. So you have to use technology. You have to use operational efficiencies to be able to deliver those services to them. All right, well, that’s it for this week. Stay tuned for next week.

– Andres