Business persons talking in the office
Successful wealth planning involves a healthy mixture of assessing your current finances and looking toward the future. For the present, you might assess how your wealth advisor—if you have one—has serviced your wealth up to this point. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, take an honest look at where you’ve succeeded or failed yourself.
But what about looking to the future? Whether you’re looking for a new wealth advisor or thinking about taking a more hands-on approach, it’s important to see what help is available for oversight of your wealth. Here are two ways the wealth advisory industry is evolving.
A More Accessible Family Office Model
For generations, ultra-high-net-worth families have relied on private family offices. These are dedicated teams of professionals who coordinate every aspect of their clients’ wealth. This includes everything from investments to tax strategy and estate planning to cash flow management. These sophisticated operations evolved to handle the complexities of multi-generational wealth, serving families with hundreds of millions or even billions in assets.
According to Barry Glassman, founder of Glassman Wealth Services, taking this comprehensive approach and making it available to families in the $5-25 million net worth range has proven very successful.
“Nearly 30 years ago, when I first started taking on clients, I knew I wanted to do more for each and every family—more than just asset allocation and investment selection,” explains Glassman, who has studied the family office model since his early days in the industry. “The most sophisticated wealth management happens when all your advisors are working in concert, but this level of coordination rarely happens for families worth $15 million, even though it should.”
This family office approach particularly resonates with successful professionals and business owners who understand the value of coordinated expertise.
“When clients see their various advisors brainstorming together, sharing insights, and building comprehensive strategies, they understand why this model has been so successful for the ultra-wealthy,” Glassman notes. “We’ve always believed in making this sophisticated approach accessible to more moderately affluent families.”
Families working with traditional wealth advisors usually don’t receive this high tier service. They are responsible for coordinating their financial needs among various experts who don’t or rarely communicate with each other. With a family office model, the wealth advisor provides a coordinated advisor ecosystem. Rather than working in silos, it enables tax professionals, estate attorneys, and investment managers to collaborate proactively on client strategies.
To successfully provide family office services, wealth advisors have to make internal adjustments. Advisors need to spend notable time on each of their clients, and therefore can’t oversee a more industry standard client load of 100+ per advisor.
Glassman Wealth Services has set higher investment minimums and deliberately limited client numbers. Their client to advisor ratio currently hovers around 35 to 1. This ensures each family receives the attention their complex finances require.
More Competition From Fintech
Wealth and investment advisors of the past had strong advantages over those working today in terms of authority and access. Before the tech boom, individuals were extremely reliant on their advisors for financial information and available tax and investment strategies. Information available online and new fintech offerings, however, have empowered more people to move away from their advisors.
To make matters more complicated, artificial intelligence has grown by leaps and bounds just in 2024 alone. With the technology becoming more advanced, 2025 is likely to bring even more AI options for those wanting to self-direct their wealth.
Justin Donald, founder of The Lifestyle Investor, has seen technology and investment options advance quickly and notices advisors are struggling to pivot their service offerings.
“We have entered a new era of financial democratization, with innovative financial technologies emerging at an unprecedented pace. Yet most traditional wealth advisors are falling behind the times because they are focused on managing traditional stock and bond portfolios while overlooking some of the lucrative opportunities reshaping modern investing,” he says. “Things like alternative investments, cash flowing assets, real estate syndications, private credit, cryptocurrencies, emerging technologies, and other alternative income streams are changing the landscape and offering many new opportunities that are changing the way people invest.”
Now, stocks and bonds are still the “meat and potatoes” of most peoples’ portfolios. However, millennials and Gen Z investors are increasingly turning to fintech to guide their rising interest in cryptocurrency and other nontraditional investments.
If wealth advisors fail to keep up on current trends and investment varieties, they may struggle to demonstrate greater value than an app that costs $5 a month. At a bare minimum, advisors will need to keep up to date on the latest fintech and know how to use it. That way, they can tout an equal or greater technical knowledge as their customers and view the resulting data through the lens of years of wealth advisory experience.
No Longer One Size Fits All
With the increasing number of investment categories, advancements in fintech, and the overall complication of tax law, wealth advisory needs vary greatly between individuals. When a field is changing so dramatically, experts in that field will need to adapt accordingly or be rendered obsolete.
So to draw in tech-savvy investors, wealth advisors will need to bring value that customers can’t get elsewhere. Whether it’s serving the function of a family office or creating a stronger relationship with the customer, what worked in the past may no longer be enough.