With historic intergenerational wealth transfer well underway, financial advisers must urgently build relationships with the children of their clients, says financial professional Bobby Ning.
Speaking at June’s 2025 MDRT Annual Meeting in Miami, the Co-Founder and MD of Canada-based Financial Literacy Counsel, said advisers often miss the reality that their business is vulnerable to client mortality.
“Once a client dies, the wealth they advised on doesn’t disappear – but the relationship often does,” he said.
While that’s not news to readers of Riskinfo, Ning – whose firm’s baseline consulting fee is CAN$7,000 – shared ways in which advisers can retain a family’s business – and it all comes down to cultivating relationships with the kids.
We’re at the helm of the greatest wealth transfer in history…
He noted that 80% of adult children do not retain their parents’ financial adviser, and explained that while most advisers spend decades building strong rapport with their clients, they rarely extend the same level of relationship-building to the clients’ families.
“This is not just a statistic, it’s a wake-up call,” he said. “We’re at the helm of the greatest wealth transfer in history.
“And I’m here to say that there’s an opportunity for every one of you in your business, in your practice, to connect with the next generation. Because if you don’t know them today, you’ll definitely lose them tomorrow.”
He said families need to ensure the people who created the money aren’t just passing it on to be spent.
“Clients are looking to you, their adviser, to really help prepare their children for the responsibilities of wealth,” said Ning.
“If you’re not there for them, someone else will be. Whether that’s their friends or AI technology, because they feel like they can do it themselves.”
Ning’s advice is to build a multi-generational practice. His firm does this using a framework called ADDIE to help the children of high net worth clients understand money management and the value of prudent investing.
ADDIE stands for:
- Analysis – determine needs
- Design – content planning, scope, and sequence
- Develop – create, review, approve content
- Implement – deliver the workshop/lesson, collect feedback
- Evaluate – conduct process audits and improve content
ADDIE is used for educational sessions with clients’ children and can start with the basics of helping them keep track of their weekly expenses and the benefit of saving.
Ning also outlined his firm’s work with schools going back 25 years.
“You can go in there [a school] and just talk about understanding the concept of when you get your first job,” he said. “How do you read your payslip?
Take every moment and opportunity that you can talk to a child about money…
“We’ve also got to look at the motivation for these kids. You’ve got to start thinking about what matters to them. You want to talk to them in a way that they feel like you understand them, because if they’re getting paid, it means they’re thinking they can spend some money.”
Ning says one of the things he’s learned from speaking with school children is that if they’re a spender, they want to spend all their money.
“But we show them you can save to spend later,” he says.
Clock is ticking
He also reinforced that time is not on the side of advisers not already connected with the wider family of clients.
“Take every moment and opportunity that you can talk to a child about money,” he said.
“Remember, eighty percent of them will leave you. So they may be cute today, but in 20 years they disappear because they forget you. Then you’re like, ‘what happened? I was at your house every year.’.
“So take that five minutes with them, because that five minutes means more to them than you’ll ever recognise, because of the care that you provided.
“Talk to them, because even two minutes is better than zero because, then it becomes awkward as you get older.”
