Wealthy Investors Say Bigger Is Better When It Comes to Advisory Firms: Cerulli

This underscores the challenge that local business owners face competing with major brands for clients, Cerulli said.

“These overall preference levels present a bit of a challenge to emerging registered investment advisors and independent broker/dealer advisors, as they rarely possess high levels of unaided awareness among prospective clients in their periods of critical advice need,” Scott Smith, Cerulli’s director of advice relationships, said in a statement.

According to the research findings, neither advised nor unadvised investors favored advisory practices that offer only online engagement options. These garnered just 1% from the former and 5% from the latter.

Interestingly, however, 12% of both unadvised investors with less than $250,000 of investable assets and those with more than $5 million favored online-only engagement. 

“While Cerulli believes digital platforms will play a crucial role in the future of advice, these results underscore the importance of human advisors as the core of wealth management competitive positioning,” Smith said.