How Financial Advisors Can Grow During the Great Wealth Transfer (Sponsored Content)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Because you're a subscriber to this Bloomberg podcast, we thought you'd be interested in a sponsored podcast called The Great Client Transfer, produced by Prudential and Bloomberg Media Studios. Here's a recent episode.

**Maggie Lake** (0:13)
Welcome to The Great Client Transfer. If you're a financial advisor, I'm sure you've heard about and thought about The Great Wealth Transfer. This is an inflection point where there's a huge opportunity to try to solidify a new generation of clients. However, when the money moves, there's a very good chance your clients will move too. Demonstrating true understanding of how this new generation thinks about wealth and retirement will be essential. Today, we'll discuss the data behind the wealth transfer and how financial advisors can make the most of this moment.
I'm Maggie Lake, a financial journalist, and I've heard experts opine on this issue for years. But today, I want to boil it down to some hard facts and actionable ideas. To do that, I've put together a fantastic panel. We have Chelsea Ransom-Cooper, a financial advisor with Zenith Wealth Partners, who's actively working to retain current clients and attract new ones. Brittany Castro, a financial planner, will offer a behavioral finance perspective for our conversation. She's here to decode the why behind a lot of client actions we've been seeing. We have David Blanchett, the head of retirement research for Prudential Financial and Portfolio Manager at PGIMB.
Welcome everybody. It's wonderful to have you here in person.

**Chelsea Ransom-Cooper** (1:33)
Thank you for having us.

**Brittney Castro** (1:34)
Yeah, great to be here.

**Maggie Lake** (1:36)
This is a really important topic, so I think we're going to have some fun and hopefully give some people some stuff to learn about. David, Prudential has done a lot of research on this great wealth transfer.
What's the research telling you?

**David Blanchett** (1:49)
It's a really big number. According to a Cerulli report, over $100 trillion is estimated to be transferred to generations in the next 25 years. We're talking about just this tremendous opportunity and this risk, because if you look at people when they're asked, like, are you going to stick with your parents' advisor, only about 19-ish percent say they're going to stay with their advisor going forward. I think that what this creates is just this question, like, how are you preparing as an advisor to meet this new possible demand?

**Maggie Lake** (2:19)
That's a shockingly low number, I think. I was not expecting to hear that. Brittany, you focus on the behavioral part of finance.

**Brittney Castro** (2:28)
Why?

**Maggie Lake** (2:29)
Why is that number so low? Why do people feel like they have to make a change?

**Brittney Castro** (2:33)
Well, I think for so long, they feel unheard or unseen by the financial advisor, especially in this scenario where it's the next generation. They probably are looking at that advisor as like, no offense, but old dinosaur, like they're not talking to me in a way that makes sense. They're not like relating to me where I'm at, with my goals, with my different lifestyle.
I mean, planning is a lot different for millennials and younger than it is for the baby boomer generation. So if they're feeling unheard, unseen, uncomfortable asking questions of the person that they're supposed to hire as their professional, of course they're gonna leave and find somebody who is more relatable, who can help them where they're at, help them feel empowered, not feel bad about the decisions they've been making with their money up until that point.

**Maggie Lake** (3:21)
And that, I find it surprising because there is, it's a big important thing. It can be stressful. So you would think continuity would be the easy path, the path of least resistance, but they're blowing it up and saying, I want something different. I want to find a change. Are you seeing that?

**Chelsea Ransom-Cooper** (3:34)
Absolutely. I'm seeing it with a lot of the clients that are even coming to us right now.
So I worked with a family who was going through the similar situation.
And as they were planning for their wealth transfer to their children, the children met that advisor. And when they walked out of that meeting, they're like, this is not our guy. This is not our person. It felt like a dinosaur to Brittany's point. And they wanted somebody that could actually understand where they were coming from based on where they were in their life as millennials. So I think that's the element where they decided to look for somebody on their own and then start to have family conversations with this newer advisor, AKA me, instead of that traditional advisor.

**Maggie Lake** (4:11)
This has to be a tough statistic for some to hear because I certainly know when I talk to people who work so hard trying to grow their net assets and have something to leave for the next generation, they've worked so hard. They want to protect their life work and they want to make sure that it is able to transfer in a seamless way. But now we hear this big disruption.