Very few HNW clients feel they’re getting a personalised service

Global high-net-worth individuals’ (HNWIs) wealth reached US$98.3 trillion ($143 trillion) at the end of 2025, up 8.7 per cent on the year, and yet only 17 per cent of those clients say the advice they receive feels “seamless and personalised”.

Capgemini’s 30th World Wealth Report shows Australia had 352,800 HNWIs, with total wealth of US$1.16 trillion. It says the challenge facing firms serving HNWIs is “rooted not in demand but in delivery and rising HNWI expectations”.

The report draws on interviews with more than 6500 HNWIs, about 200 of them in Australia. It has found that most (97 per cent) wealth management firms still segment clients primarily by wealth bands, and more than three quarters (78 per cent) rely on traditional risk profiles, which limit their ability to tailor experience to increasingly diverse client needs.

“As a result, traditional wealth firms struggle to meet new HNWI needs and requirements, while focused competitors, including family offices and wealthtechs, are growing more rapidly,” it says.

Luca Russignan, global head of the Capgemini Research Institute for financial services, says dissatisfaction with existing advice offers is upending who clients choose to deal with. He says the number of clients holding a one-to-one relationship with a single wealth manager has fallen 50 per cent globally over five years, and 34 per cent in Australia. The number of Australian HNWIs banking with two to four firms has risen 90 per cent over the same period.

“When we asked what is the main driver of that fragmentation, the number one was better access to alternative investments, and the farther up you go in the [wealth] chain, the more this becomes important,” Russignan says.

The second issue is what clients now want advice on.

“The idea of managing wealth is evolving, and there is an increasing demand for what we call value-added services, additional elements beyond, strictly speaking, financial advice,” he says.

Demand is growing for longevity planning, health-linked wealth solutions, and tax, estate and retirement planning.

Russignan says that just under 50 per cent of clients globally told the survey they would consolidate wealth back to a firm that offers a genuinely “orchestrated” experience.

“It’s not a matter of trust per se, it’s really a matter of the experience,” he says.

“Nobody wants to manage four relations. It’s a function of, if I need to do that to get to what I need, I will. But the idea of a holistic experience, that’s what these individuals want.

“If you can give me the better experience, if you can really offer that integrated orchestration that I’m seeking… individuals told us yes, we would consolidate more wealth if that experience was what we expect.”

Automation versus augmentation

The report separates automation of advice, which removes tasks from people, from augmentation, which plays into the human aspect of advice and strengthens the role of an adviser’s professional judgment.

“Foundational capabilities” of wealth management include automated note-taking, meeting briefs, and generating a single client-view. Russignan says there is no advantage in leaving these processes manual – in fact there may be a disadvantage – but there also is no lasting advantage in automating them.

“A bank deploying a copilot in Australia, in the US, in the UK will save 30 minutes per meeting. You might have three months of competitive advantage, but it’s not a sustainable competitive advantage,” he says.

Firms should be focusing on what the report describes as “differentiator capabilities”. Russignan says these could include the ability to forecast maturity events, liquidity needs and market triggers and raise them before the client does, and on-call intelligence agents that can run on a second screen during a meeting, feeding the adviser context and sentiment.

“I’m giving you… ammunition to have a better conversation, to have a deeper conversation,” he says. “It’s not taking away, it’s actually creating a new entry point.”

Personalisation at scale

Russignan says the basis for resolving an apparent contradiction in the term “personalisation at scale” lies in establishing solid institutional knowledge.

“The starting point is… how do you make sure that every interaction [advisers] are having feeds into an intelligent system that really starts enriching and becoming more sophisticated as it goes,” he says. The firm then plays proactive insights back to whichever adviser is in front of the client.

But there’s a key foundation that needs to be in place before any of this is possible.

“You need to get your house in order, you need to get your data foundation, the single view of the customer in order,” Russignan says. Then the augmentation aspect becomes really useful in a client relationship.

“It builds on the breadth and depth of your existing relationship to play it back to your individual client in a manner that is really relevant and is really personal,” he says.

The report suggests that this feedback loop – data informing better questions and discussions, and those discussions generating better data – creates a “compounding advantage”, which means the sooner the process starts the better.

The differentiator capabilities can free up to 50 per cent of an adviser’s operational time, the report finds.

“Now you have more time, and with that additional time you can have more conversations that enrich the institutional knowledge layer, and now that layer can actually play back to you, and you can actually ask me better questions,” Russignan says.

Orchestration and the human core

The World Wealth Report says that for an adviser used to being the single point of expertise, orchestration is a shift in identity, from doing everything to coordinating specialists across tax, estate, lending and health. Russignan says it is a people problem before a technology one.

“This is a technology transformation, true, but it’s a human transformation at the heart. It’s as much change management as it is about technology,” he says.

“How do you make sure you’re going to do this with them, not to them? It’s a small but fundamental difference.”

Russignan says advisers tend to be older and difficult to replace, but the same tools that make them more effective now are also attractive to “a new generation of professionals that want that new age, innovative, AI-driven experience that they can find in other professions as well”.

Russignan says the core adviser-client relationship should survive any automation. The report quotes interviewees across BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and Pictet making the point that the human connection is the one thing competitors cannot replicate.

“The broadening of the product and services access is what gives you the ingredients to personalise the advice,” he says.

Supercharging the relationship between client and adviser “makes that much more personal and much more human, and all of that comes together with that augmented intelligence layer that enables the delivery of all of that”.

“It’s not a technology problem. It’s a human problem. It’s a change management opportunity.”

Russignan says that despite the fact that advantages compound and accelerate over time, and other organisations might already be well down the track, it is not too late for any firm to start.

“The opportunity to catch up and to do some very exciting things remains very much at hand,” he says.

“It needs strategic clarity, it needs sponsorship from the top, it needs the ability to articulate a clear vision, but that’s not too late.”