Since the start of this decade, wealth management has transformed dramatically. Technology is evolving at such a rapid pace that the sector could look vastly different in the next few years.
With 2030 edging ever closer, FinTech Global spoke to leaders from across the sector to explore what wealth management might look like by the end of the decade.
The four big shifts in the market
Friedhelm Schmitt, co-founder and CEO of Fincite, sees the biggest transformation in the market being, “the client will become software.”
In the current market, a person opens an app, calls their advisor or logs into a platform when they want to manage their finances. However, Schmitt sees a future where AI agents will handle most of the work.
He said, “By 2030, more clients will have their own AI agents. Those agents will know their assets and liabilities, their family situation, liquidity needs, etc. They will monitor and compare and negotiate and ask other systems to act.”
This will create a whole new dynamic within wealth management, one where the client is not the user of a wealth manager’s software, instead their own software will be the user. This will establish a new client relationship.
He added, “That is a much bigger shift than putting an AI copilot next to an adviser. So the next phase of WealthTech is machine-to-machine wealth management.”
As for Fredrik Davéus, CEO and co-founder of Kidbrooke, sees the biggest shift being the move from occasional financial reviews towards support that responds in real-time as a client’s circumstances change. The current system revolves around periodic reviews. Most of the insights into a customer come from fixed points in the relationship. Whether a customer starts an application or attends an annual review, these form the basis of the knowledge base.
However, by 2030 technology will help wealth managers to better recognise when something in the client’s life has changed and offer better support when helping the client decide what to do next.
Davéus explained, “AI will make those interactions much easier, but the underlying financial analysis must be dependable. A useful conversation about retirement, for example, needs to show the effect of changing contributions or market outcomes. The opportunity is to bring that insight closer to the moment a person can act on it.”
Jurgen Vandenbroucke, managing director at everyoneINVESTED, who shared his personal view based on his academic expertise in financial engineering, believes a much greater structural shift could take shape between now and 2030. Vandenbroucke anticipates a gradual redesign of the industry’s infrastructure around tokenised assets, programmable services and client-controlled digital wallets.
He stated, “In our work on financial engineering and digital-asset use cases we view the transition as gradual and hybrid, but by 2030 wealth management could increasingly operate on infrastructure designed for continuous, data-rich and automated interaction rather than periodic processing through disconnected systems.”
This transformation is aligned with the industry’s mission towards getting everyone invested. Tokenisation could have a significant impact on this goal. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has predicted that tokenisation has the capacity to revolutionise investing to the same level as what the internet did for access to information.
Vandenbroucke said, “The comparison is powerful because the internet did not merely digitise printed information. It changed who could create, distribute and use information, at what speed and at what cost. Tokenization could have a similar effect on investing.” For instance, fractional ownership, broader asset availability, near-continuous access and more efficient settlement will help to reduce the barriers that currently block many people from investing. “The strategic prize is therefore not tokenization for its own sake.”
Vandenbroucke also sees another sizable shift potentially coming to the client level with digital wallets becoming the primary asset container.
While the current fund wrapper bundles assets, administration, distribution, reporting and investor rights into a legally defined product, it has limits. Vandenbroucke stated that the structure continues to be valuable, particularly for governance, diversification and investor protection, but it is a legal and operational artefact of the current market architecture.
A wallet-centred model, by contrast, allows a client to hold tokenised funds, bonds, equities, cash-like instruments and other assets in a single trusted environment. “The portfolio, rather than an individual fund, becomes the organising principle. Clients could grant permission to regulated providers to analyse, rebalance or service those holdings without transferring control to a separate closed platform.”
Vandenbroucke believes this can shift the competitive advantage from owning the product shelf or account interface to earning the right to provide intelligence, execution and protection around the client’s assets.
Where will the biggest change be internally?
As more advanced technology is adopted across the entire wealth management value chain, countless workflows will change. Some will become optimised and others will be substantially, or in some cases completely, automated to reduce the need for manual effort. This is not a future where humans are not involved, but one where their days are spent on valuable tasks, rather than tedious admin.
This is the kind of view Davéus has in mind when thinking about the operations of wealth management in 2030. Most of the routine work related to collecting information, onboarding clients, KYC tasks, preparing reviews, producing standard reports and monitoring portfolios will change substantially.
He said, “There is little value in asking a client to provide the same information repeatedly or making an adviser assemble figures from several systems before they can have a useful conversation.”
As stated, this is not a future without human involvement. People will still need to help with difficult decisions, changing priorities and uncertainties. However, advisers will have more time for this type of work while the technology handles preparation and identifies the specific areas where their judgement is needed.
In a similar vein, EXANTE‘s country Head Swiss Carmine Cammarota noted that traditional view of a consultant will be replaced.
He said, “The traditional view of a consultant who uses digital software solutions to do their job will certainly disappear. Preparing for a meeting with a client today takes a lot of time and likely involves using various digital solutions to collect data—and perhaps, in the end, printing a report on paper to share with the client. It is a sequential process that will disappear as AI becomes more widely used.”
Schmitt had a much grander vision for the future of wealth management in 2030. Rather than individual parts of the value chain disappearing, he sees the whole thing starting to vanish.
“I am less interested in which individual jobs disappear. I think the value chain itself starts to disappear.”
“Today we think in separate steps. Much of that separation exists because people, departments and software systems need handovers. But machines do not need that.”
Instead, an intelligent system can observe, decide, monitor constraints, act and then monitor the result in one continuous loop. This can bring greater efficiency across the business and provide holistic views rather than isolated perspectives across departments and systems.
This will also happen on the regulation side of the business. While regulation is still largely text, interpretation and institution-specific judgement, Schmitt does not see that scaling into an agentic world. “Regulation will become code,” he said. Anything within the business that primarily functions as an information product will gradually become executable by AI and other advanced technology.
“By 2030, the biggest automation story will not be jobs disappearing but a lot of handovers disappearing.”
A personalised future
One of the core trends currently transforming wealth management is the growing demand for personalisation. A recent report from Capintel claimed that 90% of investors prefer tailored investment options rather than standardised options. Given the demand, the majority of wealth firms are adopting personalised capabilities to meet customer demands.
Advanced technology has become one of the biggest enablers of improved personalisation. In the coming years, technology will give firms greater insights into their clients. Cammarota noted that clients will be able to access support at any time and across various channels, helping to bring their relationship with wealth firms to a new level.
He said, “Face-to-face meetings with clients remain central, but they will develop around real-time information and data to which wealth management advisors will need to adapt dynamically. Technology will finally serve to support the banker, and the banker’s value will shift more toward the ability to correctly interpret results—which will be personalized rather than standardized—to put them into context, and to discuss them with the client. “
However, just because more personalised services will be available, it does not mean everyone will receive the same level of support. Schmitt explained that AI will make financial intelligence more accessible, but not equally free. While everyone will have access to AI, the divide will be between those using generic AI and tailored AI.
He said, “The divide is between people who use a generic AI and people whose AI genuinely represents them. But whose goals does the system optimize for? Which interests come first? Ultimately: Who controls its objective function?
“That changes the meaning of financial freedom. Freedom will also mean having your own goals, values and view of the world represented in the AI acting on your behalf. That level of sovereignty will probably cost money. So, the luxury product of the future is an AI that is truly on your side.”
Davéus also noted some challenges firms could face with the use of AI and personalisation. While the technology will help more people access financial guidance, it will only be useful if they understand what it means.
He said, “A polished AI response does not tell a client which assumptions sit behind a projection or what could happen in a less favourable scenario.”
Underestimating the future
Some predictions of the future of wealth management have been clearly outlined. The rising demand for personalisation, the democratisation of investing and the deployment of AI to streamline workflows. However, on the other side of the coin, there are some aspects of the future that the industry is underestimating.
Davéus sees the biggest underestimation as the amount of work that is needed for the customer interface. He explained that engaging in better conversations with clients all depends on reliable data, consistent calculations and the ability to carry information between channels. This is incredibly important as AI becomes more interwoven into workflows. If the app, adviser and service team all have different assumptions, an AI will only make the differences harder to manage.
Another underestimation in the market, according to Davéus, is around how important it is to explain a recommendation or project after it has been made. He said, “Clients’ circumstances change, markets change and questions will follow. It will be paramount that a provider can keep the advice/guidance relevant and show clearly why an answer has changed.”
As for Schmitt, he thinks wealth management is still treated like it is a separate part of a client’s life, but that should not be the case.
He added, “Buying a house is a wealth decision, a financing decision, a tax decision, a liquidity decision and a family decision at the same time. The fact that we currently handle these things in different systems says more about our IT architecture than about the client.
“WealthTech will therefore become infrastructure for much broader life decisions. The client interface will still matter. Probably more than today. But it will be fed by far more context through data and intelligent systems interpreting all of it. So, wealth management will become less of a destination the client occasionally visits but more part of the integrated reality of the client’s life.”
Focusing on the WealthTech sector, Vandenbroucke believes the wealth management industry underestimates how much of an impact WealthTech will have on the shape of the sector. He said, “What the industry currently underestimates, I believe, is that WealthTech will not merely improve the existing value chain. It may change its centre of gravity.”
By 2030, the important question will be who has permission to apply and manage the client’s data, asset container and decision layer. If clients can carry their verified identity, preferences and holdings between providers, distribution will become open, making it easier to switch providers.
He added, “Product manufacturing alone could become less differentiating, while trusted orchestration becomes more valuable. The opportunity is to connect tokenization with the everyone-invested ambition: to make sophisticated investment expertise available to more people, in a form that is personalised, programmable and trusted.
“The future of WealthTech is therefore not a choice between technology and human judgement. It is a new architecture in which technology scales expertise and empowers clients, while accountable institutions ensure that this power is used in their interests.”
