HNW clients want advice that feels built for them. Delivering it depends on three things advisers are short of: time, cash in the right place, and data they can trust.
By Andrea Marani, CEO of FinClear
Ask a high-net-worth client what they want from their adviser and the answer has shifted. Sound execution and a good stock idea are table stakes. What they increasingly expect is advice that reflects their structures, their goals and their timing, delivered through the channels they prefer. Hyper-personalisation has moved from a private-banking luxury to a baseline expectation.
Last month’s SIAA Monthly showed why. SIAA’s Invested in what comes next paper notes that people inheriting wealth won’t necessarily stay with their parents’ adviser; they will choose someone whose service fits how they want to engage. Research by Praemium and CoreData, presented at SIAA2026 in May, found 64% of advisers say half or more of their clients are HNW, and 75% of HNW-focused advisers have clients with non-custody holdings. It’s a significant market segment!
The problem is simple to state. It is hard to be relevant to a client you don’t have time to talk to, and hard to tailor advice without complete, accurate data. Three trends are converging on that problem: time, cash and data.
Time: the capacity squeeze
The Praemium research found advisers spend around 22% of their week on compliance and administration, close to the 25% they spend with clients. In three years, they want client time up to 32% and administration down to 16%. That ambition matters: adviser supply is constrained while demand for advice grows, and 49% of firms expect advice-led models to take market share from transactional broking.
The shift only works if the middle and back office stops absorbing adviser hours. Every manual reconciliation, onboarding exception, corporate action query and account update is time not spent with a client. As Iress’s Andrew Jappy wrote in last month’s edition, the business case for modernisation is not technology for its own sake; it is reducing the cost and operational burden of change.
That is the thinking behind FCOps, the operations toolset we are rolling out across FinClear’s client base. It’s a technology-led shift in the way we work, removing reliance on tools like email and excel and providing real time insights and updates on post trade processing, administrative tasks and client trends. The goal is straightforward: take routine work out of the operations queue so advisers and their teams get more of their week back for clients.
Cash: settlement is speeding up, and cash has to keep pace
Settlement cycles are compressing worldwide. The US, Canada and Mexico moved to T+1 in May 2024, and the UK and EU are set to follow in October 2027. Australia is on the same path, with ASX having consulted the industry on moving from T+2 to T+1 post CHESS Replacement. Meanwhile, major overseas venues are extending toward 23-hour weekday trading.
For HNW clients with growing offshore allocations, that means funds must be in the right place, in the right currency, sooner. Shorter cycles leave less time to pull money from an external bank account and less room to fix a problem. Payment rails are changing too: the industry is moving away from the decades-old BECS direct entry system toward real-time rails such as the NPP and PayTo. The direction is set, and batch-based funding processes will need rethinking.
Holding cash on platform is the practical answer. FinClear’s Cash Hub, delivered with J.P. Morgan, gives clients segregated trust accounts across multiple currencies, competitive FX pricing and real-time visibility, so cash is ready when trades settle – this is what I would consider an industry shaping event. It also supports revenue: 34% of firms in the Praemium research already earn FX revenue, and 17% earn a margin on client cash.
Data: AI is only as good as what it reads
AI is moving quickly into advice workflows: meeting notes, file summaries, draft client communications, portfolio drift alerts. Used well, it is one of the most promising ways to give advisers time back and personalise at scale.
But AI doesn’t fix messy data; it amplifies it. An assistant summarising a client’s position from incomplete holdings, stale cash balances or mismatched account structures will give a confident, wrong answer. Portfolios are spreading across direct equities, managed accounts, international holdings and alternatives, and 79% of advisers say HIN ownership still matters to their clients. Bringing that picture together accurately is the real work.
That was the premise behind Fin, the AI adviser assistant we demonstrated at SIAA2026 in May. We’re doing a lot of work on how we manage data so that Fin and future adviser assistants can carry out tasks and provide helpful insights to our clients. The biggest lesson from building it was that the hard part is the data foundation, not the model!
Bringing it together
The Praemium research is also a reminder that execution isn’t going away. 70% of firms describe themselves as advisory-led, yet 83% retain direct market participant status: execution stays core even as the model shifts. That means advisers still need sophisticated order pads to work and manage their own orders, a capability that sets broking infrastructure apart from wealth platform infrastructure.
Whichever model a firm chooses, HNW clients will judge it on relevance. Relevance needs time, which efficient operations create. It needs cash and settlement infrastructure that keeps pace with faster global markets. And it needs accurate, organised data that advisers and their AI tools can rely on.
With an estimated $5.4 trillion set to pass between generations over the next 20 years, the firms that get these foundations right will have more time for the conversations that matter, and more to say when they have them.
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