As multiple upheavals and generational client transformation impact wealth management, key areas are being rewired, including advice, clients, products, distribution, growth, cost, scale and resilience, notes a new report by Oliver Wyman, the global management consulting firm.
Among a slew of head-spinning trends driving these changes are AI, personalization, embedding wealth management across ecosystems including such channels as apps and even e-commerce wallets, and increasing opportunities to grow new channels to win high net-worth clients at scale.
“The new battleground is the client brain,” the report notes. “A unified, governed graph of relationships, holdings, behaviors, preferences and risks that powers every interaction — from next-best action and pricing to onboarding and surveillance — often delivered through federated, jurisdiction-specific instances rather than a single database.
“Firms that crack this will be able to personalize communications and commercial prompts at scale, industrialize advice and manage conduct and financial crime risk more effectively than peers stuck in siloed data. The prize is decoupling revenue growth from operational cost growth.”
One theme described is how more individual wealth managers will be spending their days very soon.
“Most advisors still spend barely a quarter of their time on revenue-generating activities, with the rest lost in admin and fragmented processes — a massive, AI-addressable inefficiency,” the report points out.
“Leaders are building engines for net new money using next-best-action analytics, straight-through onboarding and advisor copilots that create selling time. Compensation rewards sticky, high-quality inflows, not just gross activity. Commercial playbooks are explicit: Convert idle cash, consolidate held-away assets and deepen credit penetration.”
“Over time, growth becomes less about hero advisors and more about a repeatable system that can be tuned and scaled.”
The report describes high net worth clients becoming the new center of gravity for wealth management. Such clients seek the reassurance of a personal advisor and a premium-feeling digital experience, “plus curated access and planning that properly integrates tax and credit.” AI is quickly playing a larger role, enhancing experience for high net worth clients of all types, “effectively doubling advisor capacity without diluting service,” the report notes.
Scaling and curating private markets is fast becoming another much more accessible aim for new generations of wealth managers.
“For firms that have not entered this space, the priority is to scrutinize platforms and partners carefully, understand where risk, economics, and governance really sit, and resist the temptation to ‘backfill the shelf’ just because peers are doing so,” the report advises. “Wealth managers will also need innovative access models — for example, services that mainstream secondary and pre-IPO activity — and ‘universities’ to educate advisors so they can explain structures and risks in scenario-based language.”
