Cerulli Associates projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with $105 trillion flowing to heirs. Every wealth firm knows the number. Far fewer have a plan for the part that matters most: whether the people inheriting that money will ever choose them.
The research says many won't, and the reasons have less to do with investment performance than most firms assume. That makes this a problem that starts well before an estate settles, and it is one marketing is better placed to solve than most firms realize.
Most Heirs Aren't Deciding on Returns
Natixis Investment Managers' 2026 Wealth Transfer Report, built on a survey of 7,050 investors in 21 countries, found that 55% of next-generation heirs plan to leave their benefactor's advisor. Cerulli's 2025 research found that 52% of affluent investors who expect an inheritance, or have already received one, do not plan to keep it with their benefactor's advisor. The Harris Poll found that 43% of heirs of wealthy Americans plan to switch even when they like their parents' advisor.
The exact figure varies because each study surveys a different group. Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2025 goes higher, citing 81% of next-generation high-net-worth inheritors planning to switch within one to two years. Treat any single number with care. The direction, however, is the same in every study: a large share of heirs are open to leaving, and a meaningful share intend to.
The reasons are telling. Among inheritors who leave, Natixis found that 29% already have their own advisor and 25% have no connection to their benefactor's advisor. In the Harris data, 38% of those planning to leave cite a different investment philosophy, 33% cite misaligned values, and 26% say they do not know the advisor personally.
Read those reasons again. Almost none of them are about performance, fees, or product shelf. They are about familiarity, shared values, and whether the heir feels understood. Those are relationship and communication problems, and communication is where marketing lives.
The Math Hiding Inside the Averages
Natixis also asked advisors how often they expect to keep assets when wealth passes. Advisors estimate they retain about 72% of assets when a spouse inherits, but only about 50% when children do. In other words, the same firm, the same advisor, and the same service model produce very different outcomes depending on who is on the receiving end.
That gap is the clearest signal in the data. A spouse has usually sat in the meetings, signed the paperwork, and absorbed the advisor's style over decades. A child has often done none of that. The advisor's value is real, but it has never been demonstrated to the person now holding the decision.
The Relationship Gap Is Really a Data Gap
Advisors see this coming. In the Natixis survey, 76% say building relationships across the whole family is their best retention strategy. Cerulli's 2024 survey found that 89% of high-net-worth practices call regular family meetings a key best practice for wealth transfer.
Knowing it and doing it are different things. Writing for Kitces, Carson Group's David Haughton explains why: an advisor can feel close to a client's family, but that familiarity is often one-directional. Heirs may know their parents work with someone without ever seeing how that person thinks, and their first real interaction can arrive during the hardest week of their lives.
Here is the part that matters to marketers. The things that push heirs away, such as mismatched values, a different philosophy, and no personal connection, are things an advisor can only learn by asking early, in a setting that feels low pressure. Nothing in a custodial feed or a CRM contact record tells you what a 38-year-old inheritor cares about. The CRM may list the heir's name and birthday, and that is usually where the record ends.
Family meetings are the right instinct, but they have limits. An advisor can only hold so many of them each year, and a meeting built around the parents' agenda rarely gives a quieter adult child room to say what they actually want. The firm ends up with a strategy that depends on conversations it cannot scale and information it cannot see.
Why This Belongs on Marketing's Desk
An heir is a prospect long before any assets move. Cerulli expects Gen X to inherit about $14 trillion over the next decade, compared with $8 trillion for millennials, so many of these relationships need to start now. Marketing already owns first impressions, digital engagement, and the path that turns a stranger into a client. Retention at transfer is the same job with a longer runway.
That division made sense when the advisor was the only channel. It makes less sense now. A 35-year-old heir lives in a digital, self-directed world and is likely to research an advisor online long before agreeing to meet one. If the firm's first message to that person arrives at the funeral, it has already lost ground to whoever reached them earlier.
Three Ways Firms Lose the Second Generation
Looking across the research, the same failure patterns keep appearing.
They treat heirs as an extension of the parent. The heir's own goals, values, and attitudes toward risk are assumed to match the parent's. The Harris finding that 38% of departing heirs point to a different investment philosophy suggests that assumption is often wrong.
They wait for the transfer. Outreach begins when an event forces it. By then, 29% of the heirs who leave in the Natixis data already have their own advisor, and the firm is competing against an established relationship rather than building a new one.
They rely on the advisor's memory. What the advisor knows about the family lives in their head, a few meeting notes, and a CRM field or two. When the advisor retires, changes firms, or simply lacks time, that knowledge goes with them.
How Knomee Fits: Winning New Clients and Keeping Families
Knomee is built to gather the missing signal, volunteered directly by the person and shared with consent. It gives a prospect an engaging experience that helps them clarify what matters, articulate their goals, and surface the context an advisor needs to be useful from the first conversation. Instead of inferring intent from clicks and demographics, the firm hears it in the person's own words.
That supports two jobs a growth team already has.
Winning new clients. Instead of scoring prospects on net worth and website activity, firms can see what a prospect is trying to accomplish and how ready they are to act. Advisors walk into the first meeting prepared, and marketing can focus effort on the people most worth an advisor's time. This matters for the heir problem too, because the next generation of wealth is also a source of new households. Inheritors who already have their own advisor, the 29% in the Natixis data, are prospects for whichever firm earns their attention.
Keeping existing families. The same approach can extend to the next generation of a client household. Heirs get a low-pressure way to say what they want and value long before any transfer, and the advisor gets context about people they might otherwise never really know. As those interactions accumulate, the firm builds a consent-based record of what each family member cares about, which supports more personal outreach over time. A child who has shared their goals and priorities, and has seen the firm respond to them, is in a very different position than one who only knows the firm as their parents' advisor.
Neither use replaces the advisor, and neither guarantees an heir stays. What changes is whether the advisor's first real conversation with an heir starts with a stranger or with context. The research suggests that distinction carries real weight: among departing heirs, 25% in the Natixis data cite no connection to the advisor, and 26% in the Harris data say they do not know the advisor personally. Both are gaps that earlier, better-informed contact is designed to narrow.
What Marketing and Advisors Each Own
One reason this problem persists is that nobody clearly owns it. A simple division of labor helps.
Marketing owns the first conversation and the data. That includes reaching heirs through channels they actually use, offering a low-pressure way to share goals and preferences, keeping the resulting information organized, and making sure it reaches the advisor in a usable form.
Advisors own the relationship. They decide when and how to follow up, bring judgment to what the information means, and carry the conversation into planning, estate discussions, and the family meetings that Cerulli's data shows firms already value.
When roles are clear, the advisor stops being solely responsible for a task that cannot scale.
Where to Start
Three steps work with or without new tools.
Identify the households most likely to see a transfer in the next five to ten years, and list the heirs who will make the decision. Even a rough list built from the existing client base is a better starting point than none.
Decide what you need to know about each heir: goals, values, investment views, and how they prefer to engage. Keep the list short. The aim is to learn enough for the first conversation to feel personal.
Build a consent-based way to learn it, plus a handoff so the advisor sees it before the first conversation. The consent matters. Heirs who feel studied will disengage, and heirs who feel asked will often respond.
Once the process exists, measure it plainly. Track how many target households have at least one documented next-generation contact, how many of those heirs have shared their goals, and how many have met the advisor. These are activity measures, not outcomes, and they should not be presented as proof of retention. Over a few quarters, though, they show whether the firm is closing the familiarity gap before the transfer arrives.
The Competition Is Deciding Now
The headline number, $124 trillion, makes the opportunity sound like a distant event. The research suggests the opposite. The heirs who leave are often the ones who already have their own advisor, never met their parents' advisor, or never felt that the firm understood what they wanted. Those facts are set long before any estate settles.
Firms that treat the second generation as a marketing priority, with real signal gathered early and shared with advisors, give themselves a chance to be the firm that was already there. The competition for the next generation of inheritors will be decided long before the money moves.
Sources
Cerulli Associates, Cerulli Anticipates $124 Trillion in Wealth Will Transfer Through 2048 (Dec 2024)
Natixis Investment Managers, The Great Wealth Transfer: An Existential Test for Advice (Apr 2026)
Rethinking65, Advisors Aren't Losing Widows. They're Losing the Next Generation (Apr 2026, reporting on the Natixis report)
WealthManagement.com, Surveys: The Great Wealth Transfer Will Bring Client Defections for Many Advisors (Sep 2025, reporting on Harris Poll and Cerulli research)
Capgemini, World Wealth Report 2025 press release (Jun 2025)
Kitces.com, David Haughton, Engaging Heirs and the Next Generation Through Estate Planning Conversations
