Investire | June 2025
If until a few decades ago it was unthinkable that over 40% of private clients (with financial assets exceeding a few million euros) would rely on a financial advisor, today it is a reality.
There are essentially two reasons for this change.
The first is linked to the evolution of the financial advisor figure, who from a free agent has become a professional capable of working in a team and making the most of the support of his client.
Today the financial advisor, with a portfolio more than doubled compared to a few years ago, has reached an excellent level of maturity and the ability to dialogue with the client on issues that concern all of his life projects.
For 79% of the wealthiest clients, the ability of their financial advisor to have an overall vision is in fact the real differentiating and qualifying element.
This means covering different areas, from taxation to trust services, to succession planning, from asset protection to estate planning.
For entrepreneur clients, the financial advisor has also become an interlocutor on issues relating to extraordinary finance, M&A operations, private debt-equity, and financing through club deals.
To which is added consultancy in the management of overall assets composed of liquid and illiquid assets (real estate, shares in unlisted companies) and management and support in liquidity events (liquidations, sale of real estate, company shares).
The second reason is that over the years the client-financial advisor fiduciary pact has strengthened, both because it has been consolidated over time with an average seniority of fifteen years (+ 53% compared to other figures), and for the quality of the same with increasing satisfaction (+ 64% compared to other professionals).
On the other hand, banks seem to be closing ranks on the largest customer segment – that of affluent customers – which holds 50% of the wealth in Italy or approximately 2,000 billion euros out of a total of 4,000.
The banks’ management of this customer segment focuses on three distinctive elements.
The territorial presence, that is, the presence of branches in the territory, even if in strong reduction (over 5,500 branches closed in the last five years equal to 20% of the total), remains for now a distinctive element.
The second distinctive element is a more standard offer that is based on strong economies of scale, making the financial consultancy model partly scalable. In this area, the use of Artificial Intelligence and the increasingly widespread use of digital in the bank – App and website – will give an acceleration never seen before.
The third element is the requalification of the figure of the bank manager dedicated to the affluent segment: almost all banks are investing in training and focusing this central figure in customer loyalty.
Considering that on average the management of an affluent customer costs 30% less in terms of time and dedicated resources than a private customer, being able to serve them adequately could prove to be a real assist.
It would seem that there is a progressive change of baton between banks and networks in terms of the type of customer segment served, but twists are not excluded.
Nicola Ronchetti