Overall investor satisfaction with full-service investment advisors rose a “significant” eight points (on a 1,000-point scale) from a year ago to 735, a study by J.D. Power found.
But advisors beware. Your wealthy millennial clients could be looking to ditch you, according to the survey.
According to the study, more than a third of millennials with more than $1 million in investable assets say they “probably will” or “definitely will” switch firms in the next year. This lack of loyalty, J.D. Power noted, could be due to the fact that 70% of affluent millennials use a secondary investment firm.
“It is conventional wisdom that investor satisfaction tracks closely with stock market performance, but for advisors who want to build long-term, sustainable relationships that can weather good markets and bad, they will need to build a deeper level of engagement with clients,” Craig Martin, executive managing director and global head of wealth and lending intelligence at J.D. Power, said in a statement.
Martin noted that younger investors usually are less loyal than their older cohorts. “Advisors will need to adjust their approach to meaningfully connect with younger investors or risk a major outflow of assets in coming years,” he added.
According to the annual Wealth Report by global real estate consultancy Knight Frank, millennials will become the richest generation in history, inheriting some $90 trillion of assets in the next 20 years.
The J.D. Power study also found that investors increasingly want to engage digitally. It said 86% of advised clients logged into their account on their firm’s site in the past 12 months and 60% logged onto the mobile app.
“Furthermore, advisors who take the time to help clients understand and engage with digital channels are consistently driving higher levels of investor satisfaction. Advisors who fail to clearly explain digital options are perceived more negatively and get half the number of referrals as their more digitally supportive peers,” the report said.
The study also said advisors should take note of AI-enabled investment advisory solutions , which is “rapidly gain traction in the marketplace.” Advisors, it said, “need to be clear on what differentiates them.”
The J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study was fielded from January 2023 through January 2024. It included 9,951 investors who work directly with a dedicated financial advisor or team of advisors.