The great wealth transfer is already underway. Cerulli Associates projects that nearly $105 trillion in wealth will move from baby boomers and older generations to their heirs over the next two decades, and a lot of that money won’t automatically stay put.
Nearly half of younger Americans plan to switch asset managers from their parents’ current provider once the inheritance lands. Winning next-gen clients takes a different approach than winning their parents did.
This guide covers seven strategies for winning next-gen clients that hold up in practice, from communication cadence to values-aligned portfolios.
Key Takeaways
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Why the Handoff Looks Different This Time
Younger investors expect 24/7 digital access to their portfolios, but still prefer in-person and phone interactions more than most advisors assume. A recent survey from SurveyMonkey and The Harris Poll, commissioned by wealth platform Altruist and its head of investing, Adam Grealish, found that 42% of younger Americans said they want to consult with their financial advisor at least once a week, compared to just 4% of older investors.
A one-size-fits-all cadence for potential client communication doesn’t survive contact with that gap, and firms still running the same playbook across every generation are the ones losing wallet share as the transfer accelerates.
The seven strategies below turn that expectation gap into an advantage, starting with how you treat these clients from the very first conversation.
1. Treat Next-Gen Clients Like New Clients
Most advisors already have next-gen clients somewhere in their book, usually the children or grandchildren of retirees they’ve served for years. The mistake is treating them as an afterthought instead of choosing to treat next-gen clients like new clients, complete with a real onboarding process and enough attention that they don’t feel like a name pulled off someone else’s account.
That means moving past small talk and into one-on-one meetings to talk about their future financial goals, whether that’s buying a home, paying down debt, or starting to think about tax-efficient investing or estate planning.
Structured financial advisor meeting scripts can help keep these first conversations focused on what a 28-year-old actually cares about, instead of defaulting to whatever agenda worked for their parents.
2. Use Your Existing Relationships to Get in the Door
Getting the first meeting on the calendar is usually the harder problem, and the fastest path runs through people you already serve.
The advisors winning next-gen business aren’t cold-prospecting Gen Z and millennials. They’re using the relationships already in front of them. Ask yourself honestly: how many touchpoints do you have with the prospect before they become your client when that prospect is your existing client’s adult child? For most advisors, the answer is close to zero until the inheritance event forces an introduction, and by then it’s often too late.
Start earlier. Invite your client’s children to annual reviews long before there’s a transfer to manage, and treat every referral from an existing household as a genuine opportunity to secure new business, not a courtesy meeting. This is also where it pays to reach out more frequently: a next-gen prospect who hears from you twice a year isn’t going to remember you when the money actually moves.
3. Combine Digital and IRL Support
Once they’re in the door, how you serve them matters as much as how you found them.
Next-gen investors are digitally native, but that doesn’t mean they want an entirely digital relationship. Only 17% of younger investors want a digital relationship with their advisor; most actually prefer in-person (29%) or phone (24%) interactions with their financial planner over digital methods like email (19%) or text (17%).
The takeaway is that a hybrid approach is essential: give clients 24/7 access through a thoughtfully designed digital platform, similar to how Altruist markets its client portal, while still showing up for quarterly in-person meetings, educational opportunities, and/or frequent phone calls.
This is also the point where DIY tools and robo-advisors enter the conversation. Younger clients have grown up with AI-powered robo-advisors or self-directed index funds, and Robinhood is overwhelmingly the investment platform of choice for millennial (40%) and Gen Z (32%) investors.
If your digital experience feels clunky next to what they already use, you’re implicitly inviting the question of why they need a human advisor when free tools exist. Digital-first interactions have to feel current, not just functional.
In practice, this usually means auditing your client portal the same way you’d audit a competitor’s app. Can a client check a balance, see a recent transaction, or pull a statement in under a minute without calling the office?
If not, you’re asking them to trade convenience for service, and next-gen clients rarely make that trade willingly. The firms getting this right treat the digital layer as table stakes and spend their actual differentiation budget on the phone calls, the check-ins, and the meetings a robo-advisor can’t replicate.
4. Show Next-Gen Clients the Value Only You Can Provide
A slick app buys you attention, but it won’t win the account on its own, so the next move is proving what a person can do that software can’t.
Once a next-gen client can see their balances and trade on their phone, the next question is unavoidable: why do they need to hire an advisor at all? The answer is access and structure they can’t get from an app.
Alternative investments like private equity and private credit are a good example: platforms are increasingly offering advisors the entire alternatives experience, from fund discovery to paperwork to billing, which is exactly the kind of complexity a self-directed investor can’t easily replicate.
Portfolio-backed borrowing is another. Margin-style lending that lets a client borrow against their own investment portfolio, without selling their position, gives you a real answer when they ask about liquidity strategy for a down payment or a business opportunity. And private market access paired with a modern portfolio management software stack, lets you deliver personalized financial planning at a level of detail that a generic robo-advisor simply isn’t built for.
None of this lands if it’s buried in a pitch deck. Next-gen clients respond better to a concrete scenario than a features list, so walk them through an example: navigating a job transition, building an estate plan, or setting up college funds, and show exactly where portfolio-backed borrowing or private market access would have changed the outcome. Specificity does more work here than credentials ever will with this age group.
5. Embrace AI
Delivering that level of personalization at scale is where your own tech stack starts to matter.
AI competency is a must-have quality for advisors trying to win next-gen business, not a nice-to-have. 54% of millennial and Gen Z investors say they want to work with a financial advisor who understands and actively uses AI, almost 20% more than baby boomers (36%).
Tools built specifically for advisors, in the way Altruist has positioned its Hazel AI Tax Planning engine, Hazel, which reads 1040s, paystubs, meeting notes, email, and custodial data to create personalized tax strategies and client plans in minutes, show what’s possible when AI is purpose-built for the job instead of bolted on.
The point isn’t to chase every new tool, including offerings from firms like Blackrock, but to streamline your operations, automate time-consuming tasks, and free up time for the in-person work that actually builds trust.
A clear-eyed tech stack strategy matters more here than any single vendor, since generic platforms rarely serve both your compliance requirements and a 30-year-old client’s expectations equally well.
6. Lead with Values, Not Just Returns
Technology earns trust on efficiency. The next strategy earns it on alignment.
Ask a next-gen client what wealth actually means to them, and you’ll rarely hear “beating the S&P.” Most view wealth as a path to security (42%) or a tool to live their desired lifestyle (25%), with smaller shares focused on building their legacy (22%) or achieving personal fulfillment (18%).
That framing changes how you should be pitching a values-based investing approach: not as a product feature, but as a direct answer to what they actually want their money to do.
For this generation, values alignment isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a non-negotiable. Clients cite not having a similar investment philosophy (38%), values not aligning (33%), and an advisor lacking trustworthiness and integrity (25%) among the top reasons they’d fire an advisor.
90% of millennial investors said they would choose their financial advisor based on their sustainable investment offerings, so building real sustainable investing capability and values-aligned portfolios through tools like personalized indexing, which delivers tax-aware, customized portfolios at scale, is worth taking seriously rather than treating as marketing language.
This doesn’t mean every next-gen client wants the same values-based screen. Some care most about environmental criteria, others about labor practices or governance, and a growing number simply want to exclude specific industries entirely.
The advisors who win here ask instead of assume, then use personalized indexing to build a portfolio around the answer rather than defaulting to a generic ESG fund and calling it a day.
7. Connect via Content
None of the above matters if a next-gen prospect never finds you in the first place, which is where content comes in.
Roughly half of high-net-worth investors report being more likely to engage with an advisor who has an active social media presence, and nearly one-quarter of Gen Z adults (23%) say they wouldn’t even consider a financial professional who isn’t publishing content online.
This is an identity- or values-centric approach to wealth building and management playing out in real time: your feed is doing pre-qualification work whether you’re managing it or not.
A few practical moves make this manageable instead of overwhelming:
- Choose one platform and commit to it rather than spreading thin. 76% of millennial social media users are on Instagram, so it’s a reasonable default, though Threads posts have nearly 74% higher engagement rates than X, and each platform has roughly a 17% adoption rate among Gen Z, so test before you settle.
- Create the right kind of content, meaning material that answers a real question a next-gen client has, not generic market commentary.
- Focus on value, not volume. Three genuinely useful posts a month will outperform daily filler, and tools like Sprout Social can help you track what’s actually landing.
- Build for the next-gen from the start, meaning write and film with a 30-year-old in mind, not a retiree, even if your current book skews older.
At a Glance: 7 Strategies for Winning Next-Gen Clients
Strategy | Quick Action |
1. Treat them like new clients | Give every next-gen client a real onboarding process, not a name transfer. |
2. Use existing relationships | Invite clients’ children to annual reviews before an inheritance forces it. |
3. Combine digital and IRL support | Pair 24/7 portal access with real quarterly check-ins. |
4. Show unique value | Offer alternatives access and portfolio-backed borrowing a robo-advisor can’t. |
5. Embrace AI | Use AI for tax planning and admin so you can spend more time with clients. |
6. Lead with values | Build real sustainable and values-aligned portfolio options, not just talking points. |
7. Connect via content | Pick one platform and post useful, specific content consistently. |
Build your next-gen strategy with SoftPak Financial Systems
SoftPak gives advisors the personalized indexing, portfolio automation, and reporting tools to deliver on everything above without adding headcount.
Book a call todayThe Next Generation Is Already Watching
None of these strategies for winning next-gen clients require reinventing your practice overnight. Start with the relationships already in your book, tighten your communication cadence, and make sure your digital experience and your values-based positioning can survive a side-by-side comparison with a robo-advisor.
The $105 trillion moving through the great wealth transfer over the next two decades will land with the advisors who showed up early, not the ones who waited for the inheritance check to clear.
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Frequently Asked Questions
It’s the shift of roughly $105 trillion in assets from Baby Boomers and older generations to their heirs over the next two decades, according to Cerulli Associates. It matters because nearly half of younger Americans plan to switch asset managers once they inherit, so advisors who haven’t built a relationship with the next generation risk losing the account entirely.
