It’s all about the Benjamins. And the bitcoins, apparently.

Traditional financial firms are pushing deeper into digital assets, and the latest move comes from San Mateo, California-based Franklin Templeton. The asset manager, long established in mutual funds and ETFs, has acquired 250 Digital, a spinoff of venture firm CoinFund. The business will be rebranded as Franklin Crypto and will offer digital asset strategies to institutional investors. “Our focus today is institutional, but advisor interest is definitely growing as the market becomes easier to understand and the use cases become more tangible,” Sandy Kaul, head of innovation at Franklin Templeton, told Advisor Upside.

The crypto space is still small, with a global market cap of just $2.44 trillion (yes, it does feel weird putting just before a number ending in trillion), but the hype train is barreling down the tracks and TradFi is hopping on board. “Franklin is as old school as old school can get, but they want a seat at the table because they believe this asset class is going somewhere,” said James Seyffart, senior research analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Cryp Walk

With President Donald Trump and Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins championing crypto, TradFi firms have begun rapidly expanding into the market. “Franklin has leaned hard into crypto and launched pretty much every crypto ETF under the Sun,” Seyffart told Advisor Upside. “They haven’t found the same success as other issuers, but it’s hard out there. They see a lot of growth potential in crypto and aren’t showing any signs of slowing down.”

Plenty of traditional Wall Street firms have launched spot crypto ETFs in the past two years. Morgan Stanley plans to debut a spot Bitcoin ETF at just 14 basis points, significantly undercutting competing funds. If approved, it would be the first fund of its kind issued by a US bank. T.Rowe Price, another legacy asset manager, updated a filing for a crypto ETF last month, and it’s expected to have exposure to alternative coins like Dogecoin, Avalanche and Shiba Inu. “Firms offering these funds have never seemed more bullish on crypto, blockchain and digital assets in the nine years I’ve been covering the space,” Seyffart said.

Not So Different, You and I. While institutions command far more capital than financial advisors, their crypto exposure is often surprisingly similar in relative terms, suggesting institutions are just as hopefully cautious about crypto as many RIAs out there:

• Harvard University’s endowment holds more than $350 million in crypto ETFs, but that’s less than 1% of its $57 billion portfolio.
• Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, the Mubadala Investment Company and one of its subsidiaries, held more than $1 billion worth of the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) at the end of last year. Again, that whole portfolio has more than $330 billion in assets.
• Pension funds in California, Wisconsin, Florida and other states dedicate millions to crypto exposure, with allocations often remaining under 1% of the total portfolio.

“It’s not necessarily that advisors aren’t interested in crypto, but for the most part, they’re looking at a 1% to 3% allocation rather than 25% of a portfolio,” Seyffart said.

Three is a magic number, as the Schoolhouse Rock song goes. So, it turns out, is $1.46 million.

That’s how much the average American thinks a comfortable retirement will cost, according to Northwestern Mutual’s 2026 Planning and Progress study. The “magic number” is up more than $200,000 from last year, attributable to persistent inflation, longevity gains and worries about Social Security. Many don’t expect to hit this ambitious target, but what matters more than any one number is pairing clients’ expectations with a comprehensive financial plan that addresses their unique goals.

“I get the attraction to a nice big round number,” said David Blanchett, head of retirement research at Prudential Financial. “But there are going to be some retirees that need a fraction of that target and some that need a significant multiple.”

Big Goals, Big Challenges

Retirement planning is increasingly complex, said John Roberts, chief field officer at Northwestern Mutual, and Americans are responding by setting higher expectations for what they’ll need. At the same time, many are worried about achieving their goals:

• Nearly half (46%) of all Americans don’t expect to be financially prepared for retirement.
• A similar proportion (48%) believes it is somewhat or very likely they will outlive their savings, an expectation shared by 55% of millennials, 50% of Gen Xers and just 40% of baby boomers.

People with more than $1 million in investable assets have even higher expectations for retirement income and savings, Roberts noted. That group believes they will need to save at least $2.67 million, on average, in order to retire comfortably, a pattern also seen in Prudential’s research.

“I see the same effect in our data, where the median required target savings increases among those who have more assets,” Blanchett said. “These are people who need to have more savings because they have higher incomes. The reason people who have saved more think they need to save more is probably because they do.”

The Advisor Effect. Americans with a financial advisor say they plan to retire at age 63.7, on average, roughly 2.5 years sooner than Americans without an advisor (age 66.1). Moreover, nearly three in four Americans with an advisor (74%) believe they will be financially prepared for retirement when the time comes. Just 43% of Americans without an advisor agree.

“These figures paint a picture of retirement that may stretch 30 to 40 years or longer,” Roberts said. “Planning for longevity isn’t just about accumulating more. It’s about building a strategy that can sustain income, manage risk and adapt over time.”

Blanchett agreed, adding that rules of thumb related to withdrawal rates can also be a useful guide. “For example, you can spend 5% of your portfolio in the first year of retirement. That’s somewhat agnostic to the level of savings. I would rather people think about how much they want to spend, subtract out Social Security or other forms of income, and then multiply that remaining deficit by 20.”

Through this exercise, a lot of people will figure out they need a lot less, and others a lot more.

Artificial intelligence is accomplishing unimaginable feats across the wealth industry.

Yet, somewhere between the strategy deck and the advisor experience, there’s a disconnect. Advisors might be quick to adopt new AI offerings, but their desired results don’t always follow. Even with increased spending on AI, 80% of firms report no significant gains in top-line or bottom-line performance. While it can be tempting to attribute that shortfall to the technology itself, the harder truth is that many strategies fail because the organization wasn’t ready. What was needed first was the initiative to foster that readiness.

When firms and vendors treat AI like any other tech rollout — purchasing, deploying and then handing it off — it can land in a culture that is ill-prepared to receive it. The gap isn’t between what AI can do and what firms expect, but between what the technological capabilities allow and what people are ready to implement.

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Jack Morgan is head of the AI practice at Rise Growth Partners.