Milan, 04/03/24 – Financial advisors wanted. If the total financial wealth of Italians, the AUM of financial advisor networks and the number of advisor clients maintained the compound annual growth rate of the last ten years (2013-2023), in 2035 the financial advisory industry would manage almost 25% of the total financial wealth of Italians and there would be room for a further 7,000 new financial advisors. The share of Italian families’ financial wealth administered by the Networks would increase from 12% to 23% and the average portfolio of each financial advisor would double from 30 to 60 million euros. This scenario is considered highly probable when compared with what has already happened in the American market in the last ten years. This prediction is made by Excellence Consulting’s research “The demand for financial advisors in the networking industry in the next decade”.
The Excellence study analyzes Bankitalia and Assoreti data for the Italian market (2013-2023) and those of the Federal Reserve and Investment Adviser Association (2010-2022) for the USA. In the years taken into consideration, the market share of the Italian networks – we recall the main ones: Fideuram, Mediolanum, Fineco, Banca Generali, Allianz Bank and Azimut – compared to the total financial wealth of families in Italy reached 12% compared to 67%. of the USA, the clients of consultants in Italy went from 3.3 to 4.6 million and in the USA from 23.2 to 54.4 million, lastly financial consultants in Italy from 21,299 to 21,491 (just +0.1 % the compound annual growth rate in the last ten years) and in the USA from 222 thousand to 390 thousand (+4.8% compound annual growth rate).
In the second part, the research hypothesizes that by aiming for 2035, the growth rates experienced in the last ten years can be maintained for our country and at the same time a limit must be placed on the number of clients that each consultant will be able to successfully manage in the future (hypothesis of 250 customers for CF). In this scenario we would find ourselves in 2035 with the total financial wealth of Italian families rising to 7,200 billion and the networks of financial advisors helping to manage approximately 23% of this wealth (∆ network market share 2023-2035: +11 points percentages), the average portfolio of financial advisors would rise up to 60 million per capita starting from the current 30 million, with an average quality of customers clearly improving (from around 135K euros per customer to almost 250K euros per customer), but above all there there would be space for approximately 28,321 financial consultants (∆ compared to today of approximately + 6,830).“Our work – states Maurizio Primanni, CEO of Excellence Consulting – starts from the comparison of growth trends between the Italian and US markets to represent a anomaly of the Italian market: the growth potential of the financial consultancy industry could be limited by the difficulty in increasing the total number of financial consultants active on the market. Lastly, we often talk about governing the generational transition among financial advisors, but the problem could be broader: the question urgently arises of adequately increasing the population of financial advisors to fully exploit the growth opportunities of the industry. There is a good probability that in Italy in the next 10-12 years there will be a need for around 7,000 consultants, who will have to help clients manage a share of financial wealth that will reach almost 25% of the total wealth of families in our country . It is certainly necessary to create a bridge between old and new generations, also focusing on team work, but above all it will be necessary to prepare effective professional development paths for those newly added to the networks, to accelerate the onboarding and growth of new financial advisors, perhaps also drawing on other professions, as has been done in the US market.
