Wealth management as an investment-advisory discipline incorporates financial planning, investment portfolio management and a number of aggregated financial services. High-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), small-business owners and families who require the assistance of a credentialed financial advisory specialist call upon private wealth managers to coordinate retail banking, estate planning, legal resources, tax professionals and investment management.
Private wealth managers can have backgrounds as independent Certified Financial Planners, MBAs, Canadian Chartered Strategic Wealth Professionals, CFA Charter holders, Chartered Financial Planners or any credentialed professional money managers who work to enhance the income and growth of long-term investors.
Investors (people) must already have accumulated some amount of wealth for wealth management strategies to be effective. The role of the private wealth manager is to provide advice on the use of various estate planning vehicles, business-succession or stock-option planning, and occasionally the use of hedging derivatives for large blocks of stock.
Traditionally, the wealthiest retail clients of investment firms demand a greater level of service, product offering and sales personnel than that received by average clients, but with an increase in the number of affluent investors, there has been an increasing demand for sophisticated financial solutions and expertise within private wealth management.
The term “wealth management” occurs as at least as early as 1933. It came into more general use in the elite retail (or “Private Client”) divisions of firms such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley , to distinguish those divisions’ services from mass-market offerings, but since has spread throughout the financial-services industry, that had formerly served just one family opened their doors to other families. Here the term “multi-family office” was coined. Accounting firms and investment advisory boutiques created multi-family offices as well. Certain larger firms (UBS, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch) have “tiered” their platforms – with separate branch systems and advisor-training programs, distinguishing “Private Wealth Management” from “Wealth Management”, with the latter term denoting the same type of services but with a lower degree of customization and delivered to mass affluent clients. At Morgan Stanley, the “Private Wealth Management” retail division focuses on serving clients with greater than $20 million in investment assets while “Global Wealth Management” focuses on accounts smaller than $10 million.
Today wealth management can be provided by large corporate entities, independent financial advisers or multi-licensed portfolio managers whose services are designed to focus on high-net-worth clients. Large banks and large brokerage houses create segmentation marketing-strategies to sell both proprietary and non-proprietary products and services to investors designated as potential high-net-worth clients. Independent wealth-managers use their experience in estate planning, risk management, and their affiliations with tax and legal specialists, to manage the diverse holdings of high-net-worth clients. Banks and brokerage firms use advisory talent-pools to aggregate these same services.
Find out how Private Banks, Family Offices and RIA firms using PCR’s award-winning Palette Platform will gain privileged access to an independent alternative for pricing, risk and portfolio performance data.

StatPro Revolution for private wealth managers

At StatPro we understand that as a private wealth manager the types of performance you need to assess is very different to that of larger asset managers or small advisors. We have therefore created a specific report for RIAs and private wealth managers. While other less savvy advisors are snail-mailing their clients cookie-cutter spreadsheet style reports, StatPro Revolution users have the ability to produce comprehensive and professional reports their clients will actually understand. No postage is necessary as the PDF outputs from StatPro Revolution can be easily emailed and shared, daily, weekly, whenever your clients demand it.
“Using StatPro Revolution allows the team members to focus on growing the business by 4% to 6% per year.”
René Blanchard, Vice President, Blanchard Wealth Management
Find out more about the private wealth clients StatPro works with.