Essay & podcast · Agentic Wealth

Agentic wealth — unlocking the agency of advisors

By Bill Woodruff, with WilliamFrank

McKinsey says the wealth management industry will be short between 90,000 to 110,000 advisors by 2034.¹ Cerulli counts over 105,000 advisors planning to retire within the decade, and finds a quarter of them have no succession plan.² The workforce has grown roughly 0.3 percent a year for ten years, against a client base whose wealth keeps compounding.

The profession has not fallen out of favor. It has not figured out how to produce enough of itself, while the assets it is responsible for keep growing. Arithmetic like that does not resolve by recruiting harder. It resolves by changing what one advisor can do, or by reimagining the way in which systems and people support them.

How advisors currently work

Approximately a fifth of an advisor's week goes to clients.³ The rest goes to everything wrapped around those hours: preparing for meetings, documenting meetings, the follow-up they generate, account paperwork, reconciling what the custodian says against the performance system.

The most productive advisors spend only about ten percent more time in meetings than the least productive. They get back roughly two hundred hours a year by reducing the parts underneath meetings that they are responsible for.

Two hundred hours is five weeks. Multiply it across a shrinking workforce carrying a growing client base and the shortage stops looking like a talent problem and starts looking like a design problem.

A design problem is solved by reimagining the way in which systems and people support the advisor: which work a person should touch, which work an agent should carry, and what record both of them work from. Today the answer to all three is the advisor, the advisor, and nine copies of the household.

The three jobs

Agents carry three jobs on the back end of an advisory business, and they are not the same job.

The first is the workflows and the steps that facilitate the administration. Filing a document, routing an approval, populating a form, moving a case to the next stage.

The second is organizing the information. Sorting what is relevant context from what is actionable, and then sorting the actionable into planning, administrative and investing. This is the work I really don't want.

Most of the weight sits in that second job, and it is larger than the word workflow suggests. Before anything can be sorted, the facts of a household have to be gathered from every source there is, validated against each other, and kept current: the statements, the tax return, the estate documents, the mail, the meeting, what the client said in passing. That is the work of building an intelligent client profile, and it is not a series of steps. It is made possible by putting all of this on a single set of rails built around AI, where one record holds the household and the agents read and write to it.

The third is anticipation. Pushing the work forward the way a team does, so that the expert has what they need to provide high level insight and tailored judgment. That preparation takes a lot of work, and it's work most experts lose interest in.

Only the first job runs on data that arrived overnight. And it is the only one the industry’s current direction in taking AI on top of antiquated rails is pushing towards.

What batch means

Batch means data moves on a schedule, and by the time anything reads it, it describes yesterday. That is enough for the first job and not for the other two. Deciding what matters is not a step, and noticing that something changed is not possible from a file that reports what was true this morning.

I wrote the full version of that argument in Getting off batch. A clearing CEO supplied the mechanism under a post of mine, without being asked: every large custodian and self-clearing firm is built on batch, and none are focused on fixing it. He named a mechanism. I had named a mood.

Agents need all context

Batch is one of four limits, and they arrive together on rails built before agents existed.

Reads are limited to whatever a screen renders. A write means a person clicking a button. State arrives in overnight files. And the agent has no credential of its own, so it acts by borrowing an advisor's login, and every action lands in the audit trail as the advisor's.

None of those is touched by a better model. Agent quality is not the variable. Reach is. An agent that proposes and a person who still executes has not removed the handoff, and if the handoff survives, so does the role built around it, and so does the overhead.

If you don't start from scratch and build systems from and organize your talent around an AI-native perspective you're going to lose. Buying and bolting on an agent regardless of quality will not likely yield strong results when bolted onto antiquated rails.

What the rails are for

Putting wealth management services on AI rails will let you serve more customers in improved ways with less people. The intelligence sits on integrated customer-specific data, does all the work that doesn't require judgment, and organizes and prompts the work that requires expert human judgment.

In practice that is teams of agents by discipline, each with its own context and memory, taught to work together. People make sure the steps run. The expertise gets separated out, into actionable planning items, investment solutions and the conversation that decides what the money is for. We end up being surgeons who come in for fifteen or thirty minutes, solve the problem, and go on to the next one.

That is what agency means here: the advisor decides what the week is for, instead of the calendar deciding it. It's time to reduce the number of layers between a client and someone who can actually solve complex financial problems or deliver actionable planning items.

What the paperwork buys

Not all of the wrapped-around work is waste.

Compliance recordkeeping exists because advisors owe their clients a duty, and the record is what makes the duty enforceable rather than aspirational. An automation that speeds up documentation without preserving its integrity has traded a time problem for a liability problem, which is worse. Anyone selling technology to advisors who treats compliance as friction to engineer away is building a future audit finding.

The line I would draw is the one I have drawn before. Work that is testable, repeatable and settled belongs on rails, with every action attributed to a named actor and nothing ever deleted. Work that requires knowing a family, weighing a trade-off, or sitting with uncertainty should always belong to the advisor.

The objection

The objection is that none of this moves the ceiling, because the ceiling is relationships. An advisor can hold a certain number of families in their head. Take the administration off their desk and you have given them free afternoons.

That is largely right. The top of that hierarchy — planning, behavior, helping a family decide what the money is for — is the part that still costs an advisor time per client. That's why the 100-client ceiling holds: the work that adds the most is the least automated. Agentic rails change that by taking the mechanical layer off the advisor's desk, not the judgment at the top.

The economics arrive underneath, in the layer whose whole job is preparing the work so an expert can be useful for half an hour. Agent rails is different, it's the first technology that can help reduce the headcount needed to source, onboard and serve customers.

A less taxed advisor

The shortage does not close by producing advisors faster than the industry ever has. It closes, if it closes, by making the advisors already in the field capable of serving more households well, with the same rigor and none of the corners cut.

Not a smarter advisor. A less taxed one, with the hours back to spend on the fifth of the job that was the work worth wanting.

By Bill Woodruff, with WilliamFrank.