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4 Steps to Creating a Multigenerational Investment Management Strategy
June 12, 2024 by Emily Tullett
Wealth and asset managers are feeling the pressure to meet the diverse needs and generational preferences of everyone from Gen Z to boomers. Gaps in generational habits are increasingly wide, and investment managers must contend with an extensive range of preferences, complex continuity planning and behaviors, in addition to new technologies and volatile markets. One factor affecting all generations is how we access information, people and goods. Personalized experiences permeate our every purchasing decision. There’s no reason to expect that financial services should operate any differently.
Time to Act
The looming Great Wealth Transfer, in which boomers are poised to leave their inheritances to Millennials, offers an opportunity for wealth and asset managers to capitalize on this multigenerational transference and minimize the risk of the next generation taking their newfound wealth to a competitor. The idea is to focus on more than simple investor retention—managers must also prepare for opportunities beyond current relationships. Now is the time to affirm your position as the future generation’s firm of choice.
Just 4% of millennials and Gen Z said they would leave all their assets with the same independent financial adviser (IFA).”
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Younger Generations Look to Switch Advisers for Inherited Wealth, FT Adviser
This new population of investors is excited at the prospect of investing as a means to achieve previously unattainable financial goals. Retaining investor relationships with this cohort will require managers to combine proven traditional methods with an updated model that keeps up with new demands.
The Future is Today
Firms are often stuck using foundations of siloed operations, legacy technologies and expanding data sets to deliver a complex matrix of personalized opportunities. Wealth and asset managers face a growing expectation to deliver at scale to the mass affluent population as private markets open to offer the same opportunities in retail investment as institutional and UHNW investors.
Firms are using our unified AI-powered platform to reimagine work and deliver work and deliver results to investors—results built on intelligence, automation and orchestration. Our platform helps you manage work across your entire organization end-to-end with a best-practice operating model of continuous improvement, connecting your data, technologies, processes and people within our comprehensive partner ecosystem.
Organizations that have embraced digital transformation are seeing an increase in productivity (13.8%), assets under management (8.1%) and revenue (7.7%)."
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Wealth and asset management 4.0, ThoughtLab
Investor expectations have shifted over the years as new generations enter the space. Gen Zs are true digital natives and tend to seek cryptocurrency advice from online influencers. Millennials enjoy the flexibility of self-serve solutions but also prefer human interactions in many situations. Gen Xers are generally digitally savvy, and likely to either save for their children’s or grandchildren’s education and/or look to retire early. Risk-averse boomers are the least likely to switch financial advisors.
Millennials are more than twice as likely (73%) than boomers (29%) to switch between providers, to move assets between firms or to begin working with new wealth managers.”
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How Can Today’s Millennial Investor Drive Business Growth Tomorrow, EY
Despite these generalizations, each investor is unique. You need to understand each investor’s risk tolerance, how they conduct research, their expectations of financial advice and their communication preferences. Relying on age-based categories and generational assumptions is insufficient to mitigate risk.
Stereotypes and generalizations aside, investors today universally expect personalized advice tailored to their specific financial planning goals, values and strategy, in clear language through their communication channel of choice. To stay competitive, firms must develop and execute an intergenerational contingency strategy.
Future-Proofing Your Firm
There are four simple steps to mitigating risk exposure and maximizing multigenerational opportunity. To build deeper relationships with investors and their successors through consistent, effective and personalized financial advice across various channels, integrate intelligent automation (IA) throughout the whole process to meet every unique need and build intragenerational trust.
- Assess the risk/opportunity
Audit the following to determine how much of your business is at risk, with the assumption that 65% of income will leave your business over the next decade.- Clients by defined age groups
- Assets under management for each group
- Fees generated from each group
IA gives real-time automated insights
Digital workers can be programmed to perform the exact work of a human worker, such as repetitive and manual tasks that can be tedious and error-prone when performed by employees—tasks like data gathering, inputting and reporting. Employees can then use their new-found time to focus on what they do best—fostering deep investor relationships and making strategic decisions.
In addition to delivering 100% accurate and automatic results, digital workers operate continuously in the background, 24/7, to generate periodic reports. You can assign the frequency that these reports should be automatically distributed to relevant stakeholders, enabling wealth and asset manager to proactively manage the risk exposure and financial wellness of your firm. With this visibility into how effectively a plan of action is performing, wealth and asset managers can optimize, pivot or stay the course accordingly.
- Create personalized investor profiles
Ask your existing investors questions to understand their behaviors and preferences, financial aspirations and risk tolerance. This analysis will help you build a foundation of trust with your investors.
When building profiles, remember to view families as a whole and as individuals. Create family stakeholder maps and identify where you should focus your attention based on an assessment of each individual’s engagement level. Creating unique personal profiles for each investor and their family members eliminates the risk of generational bias and allows you to capture investment motivations and communication preferences.
Optimize investor intelligence with IA- Identify missing data—IA can analyze the data in your customer relationship management system (CRM) to identify gaps in investor profiles. From there, you can create fields to capture the information you need and build a holistic view of each investor’s family wealth plan, family trees and financial planning goals. IA can then extract reports from the system and highlight areas requiring attention.
- Fill in the gaps—After identifying gaps, IA can use business rules to generate automated prompts to directly ask the investor for that information using predetermined questions via their preferred communication channel, or to notify the managers responsible for those relationships to gather additional information during direct interactions. Digital workers can also fill those gaps by scanning publicly accessible or third-party data sources.
- Flag potential existing investor relationships—Digital workers can conduct reconciliations of your data sets to determine potential relationships within your current investor base and identify them for investment managers to review and confirm.
- Align priorities with portfolios
Build a structure around investment products and portfolios to meet your investor’s financial goals using your insights of their motivations. Your ability to build deep relationships with investors and deliver on your intergenerational contingency strategy depends on your ability to propose more meaningful investment opportunities and maintain quality interactions.
Use information like your investors’ financial drivers around building an attractive retirement fund, saving for education, estate planning, philanthropy or real estate to align tailored investment solutions with their unique motivators.
Streamline complexity at scale with IA
Wealth and asset managers can leverage the combined technologies of intelligent automation—generative AI, machine learning (ML) and digital workers—to orchestrate hybrid financial advice on one platform. This enables you to connect the information you need to deliver bespoke financial advice in tune with each investor’s unique goals.
Generative AI analyzes vast amounts of data like investors’ risk tolerance, investment preferences, financial history and market trends while also incorporating investor sentiment and behavior gleaned from sources like news, financial reports and social media to generate personalized investment portfolio recommendations. These recommendations can be optimized for factors such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) values; return on investment (ROI); liquidity requirements and risk management.
Depending on shifting market trends, automated systems can dynamically adjust to keep investments aligned with the investor’s goals and adapt to changing landscapes. A hybrid experience of combined technologies allows advisors to uncover more products, discover evolving investor goals and have broader discussions.
Automation can generate and distribute customized reports on investment strategies, market insights and portfolio performance, and deliver those reports to investors according to their preferred channels and formats. This allows investors from older and younger generations to access information relevant to their financial goals.
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Excel at omnichannel execution
After you’ve collected the pertinent data and determined which investment solutions to propose, you can share those personalized propositions at your investor’s desired frequency over their communication channel or channels of choice. With the correct technology and strategies in hand, you’re ready to launch your retention drive and protect the long-term health of your firm.
Personalize each touchpoint with intelligent automation
You can ensure your messages resonate with each investor’s unique preferences and needs by using IA to create a personalized, effective and cohesive omnichannel communication strategy. Investors can receive information through their preferred mediums when firms seamlessly integrate tailored messaging across multiple channels.
By receiving synchronized and coherent information, automation contributes to a unified and seamless experience through messaging consistency regardless of preferred channels. Firms can keep investors informed about changes that may impact their investment by sending instant updates and alerts across their preferred channels.
Wealth management firms can provide immediate responses to investor queries by implementing IA-powered virtual assistants and chatbots. These automated tools free up human advisors to focus on more complex interactions by using technology to guide investors through basic transactions, address routine inquiries and offer general information.
Next Steps
In addition to missing out on potential AUM growth from new beneficiaries, firms that fail to execute a successful intergenerational contingency strategy risk losing relationships and clients’ wealth and family assets.
Wealth and Asset managers can protect assets, foster a greater level of trust with investors and build deeper relationships by leveraging IA technologies. IA can ensure the investor benefits from tailored experiences by enabling a firm to deliver those benefits with ease and at scale, securing the firm’s immediate and long-term success. These tailored experiences help all parties prepare for a better financial future.
Written by Emily Tullett
Global Wealth and Asset Management, and Insurance Lead
