The past decade has been marked by historic transformation: the rise of digital technologies, the fastest interest-rate cycle in 40 years, the aftershocks of a global pandemic, rapid advances in AI, and the early stages of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. For the US wealth management industry, these forces have already reshaped client expectations, investment flows, and business models.
Looking ahead, demographic realignment, technological solutions, and a continued emphasis on trust and value will bring even more change, not only altering how clients seek advice but how they define “wealth.”
Given this unique confluence of trends, the time seems right for a forward-looking perspective on how they will impact the industry in the years ahead. In this article we build on our previously published perspectives on convergence in the wealth management industry.1 We begin with the macro shifts shaping society and markets, then explore six defining themes that will reshape how the industry serves clients, competes, and grows in the coming decade, and concludes with five imperatives for wealth management CEOs. To stay ahead, wealth management firms must reimagine not only how they operate but what they offer—and to whom. Winning in this new environment will require rethinking how firms are organized and wired, and how they go to market.
Contours of tomorrow: A glimpse of 2035
Based on the structural forces at play, we can make some educated guesses about the state of wealth management in ten years’ time. These are not forecasts, but rather directional glimpses into what 2035 could look like, grounded in today’s trends and early signals. Think of these glimpses as thought starters on how the wealth management industry might evolve if current trajectories hold.
1. From boomers to “Gen Next,” and who will serve them
In the next ten years, millennial and Generation X households stand to benefit from trillions of dollars in motion—$14 trillion of assets are expected to be inherited by Gen X and $8 trillion by millennials. In addition, by 2035, intragenerational transfers between spouses in the baby boom and older generations will mean that more than 40 percent of US wealth will be controlled by women, up from a third today.2
This demographic transition is likely to redefine expectations for advice, service, and engagement. Younger investors, shaped by digital fluency, the attention economy, and social media would expect immediacy, transparency, and purpose-driven engagement. They would evaluate advisors not only on expertise but on authenticity, empathy, and shared values.
At the same time, rising rates of loneliness and mental-health challenges among the younger generations could make emotionally intelligent, human-centered relationships take on even more importance.3 For wealth management firms, success may hinge on the ability to blend data-driven insights with emotional connection, creating experiences that feel both intelligent and human.
Demographic disruption of course won’t be limited to clients. The advisor population itself is aging: nearly 40 percent of advisors are expected to retire within a decade, creating a shortfall of roughly 100,000 professionals.4 As advisor retirement outpaces recruitment and leads to an advisor shortage, technology-augmented advice models will need to play a larger role in sustaining capacity and continuity of care.
2. From automation to agency: The agentic age
In one 2035 scenario, AI would be embedded in the fabric of daily life, shaping how people learn, work, and make decisions. However, rather than replace the advisor-driven value proposition, AI could amplify it. Just as technological advances and the internet in the 1990s improved the advisor-driven value proposition with real-time market data and online transactions, AI could enhance the reach, personalization, and relevance of the wealth management proposition.
For wealth management, AI’s role may evolve from automation to agency, guided by advisor oversight. More than 62 percent of independent advisors surveyed in 2024 intended to use some form of AI for efficiency but only about 20 percent for client-facing tasks.5 But what began as task-based efficiency (for example, workflow automation and predictive insights) with the potential to achieve up to 20 to 30 percent of time savings for advisors, could mature into agentic systems that reason, recommend, and even act on behalf of advisors and clients.6 These systems could manage portfolios, independently develop personalized wealth and investment strategies, or even serve as fiduciary entities under regulated governance frameworks and supervision.7
If this agentic AI scenario comes to pass, the central challenge for firms will shift from how to use AI to how to govern it. Greater accountability, explainability, and trustworthiness will be needed in a world where clients increasingly delegate financial, lifestyle, and wellness decisions to digital counterparts. The competitive edge would belong to those firms that combine autonomous intelligence with human oversight, embedding governance and ethics into the design of every client-facing system.
3. Private, real, digital: The asset classes of 2035
If current interests in private equity, real assets (such as real estate and infrastructure), unlisted company shares, commodities, and digital assets remain in place, investor portfolios will be broader, more global, and more personalized than ever in the coming decade. Real assets and commodities would serve as anchors for inflation protection and tangible value, while unlisted company shares would offer exposure to innovation in firms that remain private longer. Interest in digital assets, including tokenized and blockchain-enabled instruments, would spur the need for evolution in regulatory approaches.
If current multipolar trends continue and the US dollar’s dominance gradually erodes, the importance of foreign assets, currencies, and commodities as hedges against concentration risk and currency depreciation would only increase. Recent IMF data show that the US dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has declined from its peak and was at a multi-decade low in the third quarter of 2025 at roughly 57 percent.8 At the same time, AI-powered tax optimization would make after-tax performance (versus gross return) the true measure of success, solidifying the shift of portfolio construction toward holistic, tax-aware orchestration rather than static allocation.
Investors would increasingly think in terms of total household balance sheets, not just portfolios, as their public, private, and digital assets would be integrated within unified platforms designed to optimize for long-term, tax-adjusted wealth.
4. Building trust in a fragmented world
By 2035, given current trends, it is likely the consumers of wealth management services will come to rely on new sources of trust. For example, polarization, misinformation, and regulatory lag may erode faith in governments, corporations, and financial intermediaries. Instead, we may see the rise of a new paradigm, in which digital and distributed trust are grounded in transparency, data security, and verifiable systems, rather than reputation alone.
Already, fewer younger people use traditional wealth management services than their older counterparts do. Today, 76 percent of Gen Z and and 65 percent of millennials already seek financial advice online or via social media instead of from financial institutions. Fourteen percent of Gen Z say they would turn to a financial professional first when faced with a question about finances, compared with 39 percent of baby boomers.9 If this trend continues, potential wealth management clients will increasingly trust networks, algorithms, and large language models over institutions, seeking proof of integrity through blockchain-verified transactions, secure digital identity systems, and auditable AI models. At the same time, the wealth relationship would evolve from “trust me” to “show me,” where confidence is earned through transparency, explainability, and consistent outcomes.
While wealth management firms cannot directly affect overall sentiment among potential clients, they can work to counter them by designing trustworthy systems—through governance, cybersecurity, and ethical AI—and cultivating trusted human relationships that convey empathy, discretion, and continuity. The firms that thrive would likely be those that master both, proving that in an era of digital fragmentation, trust can be rebuilt through design.
Wealth management, transformed: Six themes for the decade ahead
The macro forces shaping society—demographic realignment, agentic AI, portfolio transformation, and the shifting of client trust—could converge to redefine what it means to create, manage, and preserve wealth.
The six following themes highlight not just how portfolios might be built and services delivered, but how trust would be earned and maintained in an increasingly digital, distributed, and complex world. Together, they challenge wealth managers to adapt and expand their relationships with clients into trusted partnerships between intelligent systems and end clients.
1. Evolution of the service offering: When every client is a family office
In 2035, if clients continue to request holistic solutions that blend financial, personal, and purpose-driven goals, wealth management will evolve from offering investment advice to providing integrated “life management.” McKinsey’s Affluent and High-Net-Worth Consumer Survey of US investors indicates that today’s clients already seek more holistic advice as they age, and their needs become more complex across the full spectrum of planning services and balance sheet and investment products. In fact, the share of investors seeking more holistic advice grew from 29 percent in 2018 to 52 percent in 2023, according to the survey.10
Furthermore, as advances in artificial intelligence, data integration, and platform automation enable hyper-personalized and cost-efficient service delivery, what was once the domain of ultra‑high‑net‑worth (UHNW) family offices may become accessible to the broader high‑net‑worth (HNW) and affluent segments. As such, advisors would need to be able to offer services such as comprehensive financial planning, family governance, tax and estate structuring, trust administration, customized insurance, balance sheet optimization, philanthropy, medical concierge and lifestyle services to a broader set of clients.
Leading firms would extend those family‑office capabilities through new delivery models that balance human expertise with digital scale. Even in such a world, in the upper‑HNW and UHNW tiers, personalized, advisor‑led engagement would remain central but might be enhanced by advanced analytics and workflow automation. For affluent and lower‑HNW clients, these same capabilities would increasingly be AI‑enabled.
To achieve this heightened level of service, firms would need to pursue a mix of in‑house build, targeted acquisitions, and API‑based partnerships, integrating adjacent services such as accounting, tax preparation, and legacy planning into unified client ecosystems. Expanding the scope of service would be critical not only to deepening relationships and increasing share of wallet, but also to sustaining pricing power as traditional planning and investment management become increasingly commoditized.
2. Portfolio construction: From allocation to orchestration
If the global economy becomes increasingly multipolar and less US-dollar‑centric, portfolio construction would reflect broader diversification, alongside greater personalization and integration across household balance sheets. For example, McKinsey research shows that spot crypto ETFs/ETPs now exceed or approach approximately $150 billion in assets under management (AUM) and investment in retail alternatives is expected to grow 1.5–2X in the next five years alone. Advances in tokenization, stablecoins and digital settlement networks, AI, and open financial architecture would further democratize access to private markets.
In this scenario, the traditional 60/40 model would give way to multi‑asset, multi‑vehicle portfolios spanning public and private markets, real assets, infrastructure, digital instruments, and alternative sources of income. Investors might embed inflation‑aware design principles, with real assets and commodities serving as structural components to preserve purchasing power and hedge against currency debasement. Portfolios may also incorporate greater foreign exposure and commodity allocations to mitigate concentration risk and capture new sources of growth. Direct indexing would replace traditional ETFs as investors seek to tailor exposures, enhance tax efficiency, and align portfolios with personal objectives and sustainability preferences.
Technological advances would be required but these capabilities would be delivered through an adaptive, fully integrated household orchestration system, providing a single, real‑time view of all assets and liabilities across taxable and tax‑advantaged accounts. (Today’s emerging “unified managed household” platforms represent early versions of this evolution.) Advanced AI‑driven analytics would continuously optimize risk, return, and after‑tax outcomes at the household level, linking them back to planning goals. In this scenario, portfolio management would evolve from a static allocation process to an adaptive, holistic system—one that integrates data, personalization, and automation to maximize long‑term, tax‑adjusted wealth.
3. Client experience: Conversations, not clicks
As conversational AI and behavioral analytics continue to mature, and open-data infrastructure enables holistic financial orchestration, wealth management clients in 2035 would no longer navigate fragmented apps or dashboards; instead, they would engage in fluid, natural dialogue—by voice, text, or video—with both intelligent advisory platforms and their human advisors, who together form a single, coordinated advisory team.
These platforms, assuming regulatory approval, would act as personal financial command centers, integrating banking, investing, lending, insurance, and planning into one adaptive ecosystem. Clients might ask, “Can I fund my daughter’s education abroad without disrupting my retirement goals?” or “What’s the tax impact of selling my company next year?” In the future, these platforms may even be capable of responding to questions that blend health and wealth, such as, “I am considering investing a million dollars in gene‑editing therapy that could extend my lifespan—what impact would that have on my financial plan?” With a combination of AI‑generated analysis with their own insights, advisors would be able to enter conversations like this at pivotal moments, adding judgment, empathy, and contextual understanding.
Behind the interface, AI and behavioral insights into wealth management (enabled by wearables and interconnected data) would anticipate needs and personalize engagement, surfacing relevant opportunities, detecting life changes, and prompting timely outreach from advisors. Human oversight and client interaction would remain at the core, amplified by digital intelligence that scales both precision and care. Advisors would rely on these systems to monitor portfolios at a high level, identify moments of risk or opportunity, and deepen client relationships through proactive, data‑driven dialogue.
For wealth managers, the competitive frontier will center on elevated functionality, in which seamless, intuitive, and emotionally resonant experiences are delivered in a timely fashion. Technology would empower advisors to feel and act more human, not less.
4. Business operations: Digital workers as backbone of the middle and back office
If AI maturity, data standards, and the regulatory environment converge to enable autonomous financial operations at scale, AI agents and intelligent automation would form the operational backbone of wealth management. Today, AI agents already plan, act, remember, and complete defined deliverables. In the future, functions such as compliance, trade reconciliation, client onboarding, and portfolio accounting could be executed by digital workers operating at machine speed with near‑zero error rates, dramatically lowering costs and expanding capacity. These digital systems would handle increasing complexity in liquidity management, valuation of semi‑liquid and digital assets, and the custody and ledger requirements of fractional ownership. Employees, meanwhile, would focus on oversight, governance, and orchestration, stepping in only when judgment, ethics, or client outcomes demand human discretion.
This transformation would redefine workforce dynamics. Traditional operational roles would decline, giving rise to new positions in AI supervision, data integrity, and model governance. In its most advanced form, the wealth management firm could operate as a “firm of one”: a single advisor augmented by hundreds of AI agents seamlessly connected to custodians of assets, product platforms, and client systems.
5. Role of the advisor: The transition to life coach
These macrotrends could also solidify the advisor’s continued evolution from financial planner to life coach. In this world, advisors would guide clients not only on investment or tax strategy, but through life goals, intergenerational transitions, and emotionally charged decisions. Supported by a network of AI agents, the human advisor would focus on context, empathy, and meaning, translating data into decisions, and decisions into confidence. This evolution takes on added urgency given the looming advisor shortage, which will place a premium on each advisor’s ability to deliver deeper, more differentiated client impact.
If this transformation takes hold, the talent model would need to shift. Wealth management firms would prioritize emotional intelligence, adaptability, and authenticity alongside traditional skills such as product expertise or lead generation. Centralized marketing engines and AI‑enabled prospecting would automate much of the business development process, freeing advisors to focus on building trust and deepening relationships. The advisor’s differentiator will not be traditional wealth management knowledge, but the ability to connect with clients, understand their motivations and values, and build trust.
6. Competitive structure: And then there were four
By 2035, as technology further blurs the boundaries between traditional business models, the competitive structure of wealth management could consolidate around the following four dominant archetypes:
- Multi-segment mega platforms. Large wealth management platforms—including today’s wirehouses, major banks, scaled digital-direct firms, and potentially the largest registered investment advisors (RIAs)—would evolve into integrated wealth ecosystems, offering a clear progression of services aligned to every stage of wealth accumulation. These range from mass‑affluent direct brokerages to high‑touch “personal CFO” models for HNW and UHNW clients. M&A will play a critical role in enabling this evolution, allowing firms to accelerate capability build-out, expand segment coverage, and deepen distribution reach. The competitive edge of mega-platforms would lie in scale, proprietary technology, and embedded distribution, with powerful lead generation from adjacent businesses such as retail banking, corporate stock plan administration, and retirement.
- Boutique and specialist firms. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the specialist firms that remain will be expert‑led boutiques and multi‑family offices that thrive by serving the ultra‑wealthy through bespoke, relationship‑driven experiences. They will likely compete on intimacy and specialization, offering advanced planning and structuring, differentiated investment access, and family-office services, supported by outsourced technology and operational platforms that enable efficiency without compromising exclusivity.
- At‑scale independent advisor platforms. As the flight toward independence continues, advisor‑centric platforms offering modular affiliation models (including W‑2, 1099, and RIAs) are expected to continue their rise. They would continue to enhance their unified technology stacks, institutional‑grade investment capabilities, and compliance infrastructure. They would scale by attracting and empowering entrepreneurial advisors, acquiring books of an increasing number of retiring advisors (and serving them through more profitable W-2 models), and through further consolidation. They would offer the flexibility to build one of the “boutique and specialists” firms on their platforms.
- AI‑enabled digital wealth managers. Finally, a novel fourth archetype of digital‑first, AI‑native firms would redefine advice delivery for the next generation of investors. Combining autonomous AI agents with human oversight, these firms would deliver personalized, low‑cost advice at scale, expanding access to financial guidance. As the industry confronts a growing shortage of advisor talent—driving human-led services to become more expensive and exclusive—the best advisors are likely to migrate further upmarket. This widening gap in accessible, affordable advice will create a significant void in the mass-affluent and emerging-wealth segments, one that AI-first firms will be uniquely positioned to fill.
While technology would compress costs across the board, industry economics will diverge. Mega-platforms would compete on scale, efficiency, and cross‑channel distribution; boutiques on intimacy and expert‑led advice; advisor platforms on talent acquisition and retention; and AI‑native firms on cost and accessibility. Each model would require a distinct strategy for deploying efficiency gains, to either reinvest in differentiated capabilities or pass savings to clients.
The resulting barbell-shaped industry structure would resemble that of the asset management industry, where scale and specialization dominate and the middle struggles to keep up.
Rising to the moment: Five imperatives for wealth management CEOs
These themes reshaping the industry suggest the next decade will demand bold, enterprise-wide transformation. Wealth management CEOs will need to lead organizations that are AI-fluent, human-centered, and relentlessly adaptive, capable of earning trust in a rapidly evolving economic, technological, and social landscape.
This level of change extends well beyond business as usual and near-term growth levers: technology may reshape the playing field, but leadership will determine who wins. Firms that thrive will invest not only in data and technology, but in people, governance, innovation and change management. Five imperatives stand out for leadership teams preparing their firms for the next decade.
1. Invest in agentic AI: From automation to orchestration
To fully unlock the value of agentic AI in wealth, CEOs must see beyond the automation of individual tasks to AI as a platform of semi-autonomous agents that collaborate with advisors, client salespeople, service team members, back-office staff, and each other to execute multistep workflows. Across industries, initial use cases of AI agents to automate limited tasks have been shown to deliver up to 3 to 5 percent improvements in productivity annually. Teams of AI agents that executed complex workflows not only resulted in productivity improvements but also could potentially increase growth by more than 10 percent.11
Our research shows that value comes not from deploying isolated agents, but from redesigning cross-functional priority workflows, building reusable agent components, and orchestrating human-agent teams at scale. For a wealth firm, this means not just giving an AI tool to an advisor, but embedding intelligent agent teams into the advisor-client journey. Reimagining and rearchitecting workflows will likely extend through client onboarding, portfolio rebalancing, tax event modeling, and even life-stage transitions, and so will entail bold decisions.
The transformation road map should detail the build, buy, and partner approach; governance implications; and change management interventions to ensure uptake of new solutions. The technology and data backbone should involve modular, API-based architectures that connect wealth legacy systems with new digital platforms. A unified, governed data model (anchored in a single source of truth for client, product, and operational data) would be required to ensure explainability, security, and reusability of any AI analytics and workflows.
As with most technology transformations, scarce talent and organizational complexity will likely make execution take longer than expected. Early execution goals should focus on reducing operating costs through automation and simplification, while reinvesting those savings into innovation and building leaders’ AI fluency.
2. Reinvest technology dividends into innovation
Automation and AI will continue to expand capacity and reduce costs across middle and back offices. But efficiency alone is not a strategy. The real differentiator will be how firms redeploy productivity gains to fund “change-the-business” operations to unlock innovation in services, experiences, and business models.
Leaders should have a clear vision of which competitive archetype their firm will pursue, shift from isolated technology projects to domain-level changes, and track realized savings. The expected efficiency and capacity opportunities should be detailed prior to deploying technology investments. Initiative teams should be composed of cross-functional teams (product, technology, operations, and advisor teams) that are empowered to test, learn, and scale innovations rapidly. Decision-making should shift from hierarchy to networked accountability, with clear ownership and shared metrics for value, risk, and adoption. Transformation road maps should explicitly tie investments to client outcomes, efficiency gains, and new revenue sources, and firms will need systems to track and extract savings.
3. Lead an AI-fluent, human-centered organization
The integration of AI is no longer just a technology initiative; it is an organizational transformation. While it has been critical for business leaders to understand technology applications in the digital age, AI is making it more important than ever. CEOs must champion AI fluency across the enterprise, ensuring that leaders and teams understand how to use, govern, and collaborate with intelligent systems responsibly.
For executive leadership, AI fluency must include strategic literacy: understanding where AI can create value, what new business models it enables, and how to balance innovation with risk management. Leaders should participate in targeted learning programs, use AI tools in their own decision-making, and set expectations that every strategic discussion considers data and automation as integral to the business model.
For advisors, AI fluency means learning to co-create with technology, using digital copilots for research, reporting, compliance, and personalized recommendations, while maintaining empathy, ethics, and client trust. AI fluency for advisors is about augmentation, not automation. Training should emphasize how to interpret and communicate AI-generated insights with transparency, and when to rely on human discretion over automation.
For operational teams, AI fluency involves tackling new workflows and governance models across compliance, onboarding, reporting, and other service operations. Staff should understand how algorithms make decisions, how to audit outputs for bias or error, and how to identify and manage the exceptions that require human oversight.
4. Adapt the advisor model for the life-coach era through teaming
The most successful advisors of 2035 will be part wealth strategist and part life coach—empathetic guides drawing on teams of specialists, all supported by digital intelligence. AI agents will handle significant parts of lead generation, analysis, execution, and compliance, freeing advisors to focus on understanding clients’ motivations and values with trust and empathy.
To make this new model work, firms will need to change how they recruit, train, and measure the effectiveness of advisors. They will need to prioritize authenticity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence over product expertise or prospecting skill.
Today, across the industry, multi-advisor teams outperform solo practices on growth, wallet share, client retention, productivity, succession resilience, and services offered.12 Given these strengths, we expect teaming to continue to be the dominant operating model through 2035 for connecting with clients at scale. However, team structures will increasingly emphasize collaboration, specialization, and continuous coverage in addition to ownership of individual client books. Teaming will also serve as an apprenticeship model, combined with training and development programs, to prepare the next generation of financial advisors who are also life coaches.
5. Deliver the portfolio of the future
Clients will expect seamless access to a broader, more global, and tax-optimized investment universe—including private markets, real assets, digital securities, and tokenized investments. Meeting this expectation will require re-architecting product platforms, data infrastructure, and partnerships.
CEOs will need to decide what to offer, how to offer it, and how to integrate and deliver these products. This will likely mean investing in technology ecosystems that integrate public, private, and digital holdings within unified, tax-aware optimization frameworks. Leaders will begin by determining the critical client product and experience needs, and the underlying technology, data, and architecture requirements. They will then consider what inputs the data backbone integrating client, product, and behavioral data requires to unlock personalization and responsible AI.
For the architecture target state, leaders will need to develop strategies for how to build out the enhanced tech stack and other capabilities they will need. How much will they build in-house or buy? Will they strike up partnerships with wealthtech providers, custodians, fintechs, or asset managers? How will they develop and launch the portfolios that can demonstrate the integrated tax-optimized performance and risk transparency that clients will increasingly want to see? Firms that deliver trusted access to the full spectrum of wealth, spanning traditional and emerging asset classes in a tax-efficient manner, will set the standard for portfolio innovation, client outcomes, and loyalty.
By 2035, wealth management firms will be judged not only by investment returns, but by how intelligently they integrate technology, how deeply they are able to engender trust with their clients, and how broadly they provide access to wealth investment and services. Trust will remain the currency of that access, earned not only through performance, but through transparency, empathy, and responsible use of technology.
For those firms’ CEOs, the mandate is clear: lead with conviction and a strategy; invest in people, platforms, and data; and build organizations that can learn and adapt continuously. The choices made today will shape how the wealth industry, and the clients it serves, arrive in 2035—it’s not just a matter of which firms thrives through disruption, but also which succeed at defining what wealth means in a more intelligent, personalized, and interconnected world.
