World Wealth Report 2025: Building AI for Next-gen high-net-worth individuals

Our World Wealth Report is back for a 29th edition. What we learned: The next generation of high-net-worth investors is emerging, and their expectations and preferences are set to disrupt the wealth management landscape. Chief among their demands? More digital tools and a refreshed product portfolio – an expectation they share with relationship managers, who are eager to deliver greater value to their clients. For every financial institution, the message is clear: adapt or risk becoming irrelevant.

What’s everyone saying?

• The great wealth transfer is unfolding: in the next two decades, high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) will transfer a whopping $83.5 trillion to the next generations, composed of Gen X (44 to 59 years old), millennials (28 to 43), and Gen Z (12 to 27) individuals.

What do we have to say?

• Backed by nearly thirty years of subject matter expertise and insights from 6,400+ HNWIs surveyed across 28 markets in the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East: our new World Wealth Report is unprecedented in scope.

• It confirms the breadth and depth of the ongoing transfer that will unfold in three phases: 30% of HNWIs will receive an inheritance by the end of 2030, 63% will inherit wealth by the end of 2035, and 84% by 2040.

• More importantly for wealth management firms, it also sheds light on a critical implication: most Next-gen HNWIs are a flight risk.

• The reasons behind this churn? A fundamental shift in how clients expect to do business with their wealth management firms. Globally, Next-gen HNWIs express frustration with a lack of services on their preferred digital channels, ineffective digital tools to conduct transactions, and a firm’s inability to meet their unique needs. What’s more, these generations tend to be loyal to individual advisors, rather than firms: 62% say they would follow their relationship manager (RM) if they moved to a different firm.

• If they want to retain this clientele, firms will have to move fast. In fact, 67% of them are already focused on engaging and retaining Next-gen HNWIs.

• In doing so, firms should consider inheritors’ diverse and unique characteristics. The younger generation of HNWI investors are risk-takers, who favor higher growth asset classes like private equity and cryptocurrency. They also seek global diversification through investment opportunities, including emerging wealth hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and appreciate exclusive value-added services.

• But what really sets the Next-gen HNWIs apart is their strong preference for digital engagement: these digital natives want seamless, omnichannel touchpoints, and favor video calls and mobile apps over some firms’ preferred in-person meetings.

• More tech, more seamless interactions? That’s exactly what RMs want, too. Many firms aren’t adequately equipping RMs with the necessary tools, agentic AI capabilities, and support to deepen engagement with this segment. Overall, one in four RMs are dissatisfied with their employer’s tools and services. This may lead to a talent crisis for firms – a dire prospect at a time when 48% of RMs are expected to retire by 2040.World Wealth Report 2025, Capgemini Research InstituteWorld Wealth Report 2025, Capgemini Research Institute

• More specifically, RMs are frustrated with the fragmented tools and manuWorld Wealth Report 2025, Capgemini Research Instituteal processes in place at banks. Consequently, advisors rank a digital platform providing a holistic client view and actionable insights as the most important capability to effectively serve Next-gen HNWIs, followed by intelligent automation of operational tasks like meeting summaries and emails.

Who’s doing it right?

• High call volumes, long handling times, and frustrated customers. Sounds familiar? A leading asset manager faced precisely these issues within their contact center operations, resulting in call drops and lost business opportunities. To transform their contact center, we partnered with them, using our Augmented Advisory Agent solution. Powered by Gen AI and data-driven insights, this approach empowered agents, adapted interactions based on customers’ past behavior and preferences, and introduced workflows capable of independently managing routine client inquiries. Ultimately, this improved customer service and ensured consistent service quality across all channels.

What’s the bottom line?

To reimagine wealth management, the following steps are key:

• Boosting engagement to drive growth. Firms must be prepared to provide robust and tailored investment strategies to ensure the right dynamic between capital preservation and growth potential.

• Delighting Next-gen HNWIs with adapted service offerings, including personalized strategies and concierge services, to foster loyalty during the great wealth transfer.

• Empowering RMs with the necessary technology and training. RM teams are key to holding on to this restless new generation of customers. Firms must break free from legacy platforms that maintain customer data in silos and equip their RMs with a purpose-built, integrated digital platform that unites client data into a single source of truth, to be deployed at scale. Advancements in generative AI and agentic capabilities can enable RMs to hyper-personalize experiences to treat each client as a “segment-of-one.”

• Deploying agentic AI assistants to keep track of conversations and standardize tedious processes, like drafting emails and transcribing meeting notes. To explore the potential of agentic AI, dive into our new report, Rise of agentic AI: How trust is the key to human-AI collaboration.

Looking for more?

• If you want to know more about how our Augmented Advisory Agent solution automates workflows, meeting prep, and empowers advisors, check it out here.

• Another key challenge for banks today is making digital interactions feel more personal and human. To tackle this, Dutch banking giant ABN AMRO Bank N.V. partnered with us and Microsoft. As part of a new three-layer service model, we launched “Rikkie”, a Gen AI-powered chatbot which delivers a more natural, one-on-one customer experience. Explore the full case study ⤵️

And you, what are you saying?

How are you empowering your RMs to help them serve digital-native investors? Have you started exploring AI and Gen-AI-powered tools to this end? Head to the comments section below to share your thoughts with us!