How to Win the Coveted Ultra-High-Net-Worth Client

Landing an ultra-high-net-worth client — those with $30 million or more in assets — is the finance industry equivalent of reeling in a giant squid.

UHNW clients are, as the name suggests, often worth more to advisors, so courting them has become all the more important as firms try to stand out in an increasingly competitive RIA landscape. These clients control an outsized portion of the total investable wealth in the US, and they can generate fees that keep an entire advisory team running. According to a recent Cerulli report, the advisor-managed high-net-worth industry will surpass $30 trillion in assets under management by 2028 amid the ongoing Great Wealth Transfer. While cultivating trust with the ultra-wealthy works the same as with any client, advisors should be prepared to answer different, and sometimes deeper, questions, according to experts on a panel at the annual Future Proof conference in Huntington Beach, California.

“No longer is it just, ‘Can I retire? Can I send my children to college?’” said Tara Popernick, head of wealth planning at LPL. “[With UHNW clients], it’s much more philosophical: ‘Can I have my legacy sustained? Who’s going to steward my wealth?’ Questions of that nature, where intimacy has to be a lot higher.”

Upping the Service Ante

As firms offer more and more services — an average of 12 in 2024, up from 10 in 2017, per the Cerulli report — the fight for UHNW investors grows fiercer, with firms feeling pressure to become one-stop-shops. And high-net-worth clients, those with between $3 million and $25 million, are increasingly expecting services similar to those provided to their UHNW counterparts. Most important is a well-integrated wealth planning solution, said Popernick. Also of particular interest to this demographic are tax planning, access to private markets and alternatives. But there’s variation within the UHNW group, said Tobias Donath, head of go-to-market and strategy at Fidelity. “There’s people who are wealthy enough to pass on a little bit, and then there’s people who are truly generationally wealthy,” he said. “They don’t just see it in the simple silo of talking about investments, talking about estate planning. They’re looking to cut across all of the different capabilities you have.”

A recent Investments & Wealth Institute report found that, among surveyed UHNW clients:

• 61% sought health insurance advice, but only 25% of them were receiving it.
• 81% wanted access to trust services, but only 31% had access to it.
• 84% wanted wealth transfer advice, but just 35% of them were receiving it.

Intimacy Coordination. Also vital to garnering new UHNW clients — and keeping their kids on as clients — is creating a sense of intimacy, said Donath. “Intimacy is something that can be as simple as the way you ask a question,” he said. “If you stick with very transactional questions, very surface-level questions, it becomes really hard … Whereas, if you can ask these piercing questions about what this means to you, how it fits with your values — trust can come really quickly.”