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I have spent the last thirty-eight years in the world of investment management and the last twenty-three dealing with the people we all call “the affluent.” Although I do not want to cast aspersions on anyone, I feel that we – as an industry – have not done the best job serving them, in part because we have not sufficiently adapted our processes to their specific needs and in part because the affluent have not always taken the time to discern what they really needed. My point in this Preface is to take our readers through the evolution of our industry and its market over the last forty odd years, to describe the way our industry is currently structured and operating, and to identify the mission I feel it needs to fulfill. I also want to discuss the three areas of focus that should help me achieve my goal of contributing to the further growth of the industry: (1) recognize the need for humility, (2) promote a sharper focus on the definition of the goals of our clients, and (3) discuss the potential for a restructuration of the typical advisory firm so that it can better serve its target market. But, first, we must define what we mean by “the affluent.”

There are about as many definitions of that group of people as there are people trying to serve them. They can be described by the financial assets they possess, but this can be misleading, as assets can be income-producing or not; they can be owned or in some form of generational wealth transfer structure; they can be liquid or illiquid; they can even cost more to maintain than they produce in terms of income! Think of the aristocratic European families, for instance, who conduct guided tours of what is left of their castles or estates because that is the only income they have to live on and maintain these massive structures!

I define the affluent as a group of people who have liquid assets of at least $5 million and who could maintain their lifestyles drawing income and principal from these assets, even if they do not earn material outside revenue. Thus, a family with $5 million, where both husband and wife are in their early sixties and semi-retired and spend $250,000 a year would qualify. By contrast, a single individual – a young man, for instance – with $10 million who spends the same $250,000 a year and is in his thirties would not be affluent, by my definition. Our semi-retired couple does not have to change their lifestyle to enjoy a high likelihood of not running out of money in the next twenty-five or thirty years, which corresponds to their current life expectancy, if they have taken the precaution to buy appropriate catastrophic insurance.1 By contrast, the young man in his thirties has a sixty-odd-year life expectancy; unless he is an excellent investor, he could well run out of money spending about 2.5 percent of his assets each year, particularly if inflation was to play dirty tricks on him. He could run out of money in two different ways. First, he could run out of money by taking too much risk that does not pan out into higher returns if he simultaneously tries to grow the assets while being unwilling to cut his spending. Conversely, he might run out of money by being too conservative in his investments, which would then not earn enough of a return to carry him through the balance of his life, let alone the possibility that his spending might change as and when he decides to marry, start a family, and raise children! In short, you have to look at assets, running spending rates, and required horizons before labeling someone – a family or an individual – affluent in my definition.

Over the last twenty plus years, I have had the luxury to follow the evolution of this industry with a serious dose of fascination coupled with cynicism. When I first started to work with the affluent, as the chief investment officer of J.P. Morgan's (JPM) Global Private Bank, the vast bulk of the industry's assets, at least in the United States, were comprised of inherited money. JPM at the time had to be one of the largest players in the industry globally, and probably the largest in the United States; we used to figure that 80 percent of the financial assets entrusted to us were either in trust or inherited. Our clients trusted their portfolio managers and trust officers, and these people truly tried to do what was best for their clients, rather than for themselves or their employer. In fact, I vividly remember our “big boss” reminding us at every opportunity that “clients pay your salaries, not the bank!”2 Fiduciary responsibility – putting client interests ahead of our own, duty of care and loyalty, avoiding conflicts of interest, and managing costs and expenses for the benefit of the client – was our sole guiding light. In truth, the processes we used were, with the benefit of hindsight, somewhat simplistic, but some of that was driven by the law. Would you believe that we were told then that hedging currency risk in foreign equities, for instance – which required us to buy foreign exchange contracts – was a speculative activity?

Back in the late 1960s, the industry experienced a first important change, which affected both private and institutional wealth management, although it is fair to suspect that private clients might not have totally accepted or even understood it. The advent of modern portfolio theory that resulted from the work of Nobel Economics Prize laureates Harry Markowitz and Bill Sharpe led us and many others to begin to view the investment “space” as a two-dimensional affair that comprised both return and risk. Hitherto, the principal focus had been on return.

Then two other changes impacted directly the private wealth management industry. First, the make-up of the clientele began to change. With the substantial equity market rally that followed the success experienced by Fed Chairman Paul Volker fighting inflation and with investment bankers much more diligent looking for mergers and acquisitions or initial public offerings, self-made money was becoming a much more important source of clientele for investment managers. These clients were different from inheritors in several ways. The two main differences were that they were less educated in the behavior of financial markets – their experiences were with creating and running businesses – and much more demanding of their financial advisors – they had achieved their status of financial wealth through and with the help of advisors and were not afraid of being tough with them. They quickly found trust officers too sleepy – little did they know that those officers were by and large simply doing their jobs and following the rules that were laid down for them. In addition, having dealt with investment bankers and brokers when selling their businesses, they were more inclined to hire them rather than those bank trust departments when it came to choosing a wealth advisor!

The second change was the growing recognition, which JPM pioneered in the United States, that individuals were very different from institutions in that they had to pay taxes. The phrase was coined: “It's not what you get, but what you get to keep that counts!” This moved us from our two-dimensional space to one that had a third dimension, tax-efficiency. It would prove to be an important source of innovation starting in the second half of the 1990s. Although that focus has not been universally accepted, in part because absolute levels of returns in the 2000s were often low enough to allow tax-efficiency to appear unneeded, it is one of the two innovations I fully expect will define our industry in the years ahead.

This was but the first step in a process of deepening our understanding of the needs of the wealthy, which has now expanded into many directions. We now recognize that wealth management is about much more than managing assets: the mission of the wealth management industry has thus been more broadly defined. We indeed “discovered” that capital can be financial, but also includes human, social, artistic, philanthropic, and emotional dimensions. We “discovered” that individuals do not typically have single goals and single risk profiles: they have multiple goals, each goal usually has a different time horizon, and they have different required probabilities – or levels of certainty – that each goal will be reached. We “discovered” that there are important – and quite complex – interactions between the various dimensions of the wealth management challenge. We explicitly set out tax-efficiency as a crucial interaction between investment and tax planning; but there are similar interactions between investment and financial planning: Who should own what and how liquid do I need my investments to be? Similarly, philanthropy interacts with investment, estate, and tax planning. Estate planning is another obvious dimension that cannot be taken up outside of a serious discussion with investment managers and other advisors.

Charlotte Beyer, who founded the Institute for Private Investors, used to compare each affluent individual or family to a company, which she called “My Wealth, Inc.” Taking her point a bit further, you can observe that there has hardly ever been a successful chief executive officer of a successful large company who was not aware first that the company comprised many divisions – each focused on some different aspect of the business, such as research, engineering, production, marketing, client service, legal and regulatory, human resources, and the like – and second that these divisions had to be efficiently coordinated so that the whole was more than the sum of the parts. The same construct can be imagined for a wealthy family, even if wealth is modest, in that individuals need to be aware of the several issues on which the family, the head of which could be called the “CEO of My Wealth Inc.,” should focus.

Today, the industry neatly divides into three general categories of providers. First, you have the manufacturers; their function is to create the products and services the affluent and their advisors need to use. Second, you have advisors who have elected to focus on only one or two of the many dimensions of the problem faced by their clients; they may be tax lawyers, estate lawyers, certified public accountants, investment advisors, philanthropic consultants or managers, family education or governance specialists, and many others. Finally, you have a wide variety of advisors and consultants who try to take a holistic view of the overall problem, effectively seeking to make money sitting next to the client, on the same side of the table as the family. That they are not all equally successful should not surprise; what may, however, be surprising is that quite a few of them naturally believe that they are exactly what the doctor ordered, when in fact the problem is quite a bit more complex than their current understanding of it.

In this book, my desire is to contribute to the further growth of the industry in at least three areas. First, I continue to think that the affluent need to know more about the questions they should ask and the issues they ought to feel are important. The initial insight must be a recognition that our industry – with respect to both advisors and clients – suffers from an imperfect ability to predict and thus deal with the future. We will go into this in more depth in the book, but I am still flabbergasted by the fact that so many people do not appreciate that God created weather forecasters to make investment managers look good! The late Sir John Templeton, an icon in the industry who died well into his nineties, once said that he had never seen an investment manager who is right more often than 65 percent of the time. Now, think what this means: the best managers are wrong at least 35 percent of the time! Most investment managers do not (or should not) have more than a modest confidence in their expectations: diversification matters, hubris should be out! Yet, how many individuals are still mesmerized by pronouncements of talking heads and expect their advisors to know when to be 100 percent in cash and 100 percent in equities? A corollary of this is that individuals should know that what is hard for trained advisors to do must, almost by definition, also be very hard if not harder for them. In short, a healthy dose of humility should permeate the thinking and dealings of industry participants and of their clients.

Second, I continue to think that a lot more progress is needed in the discernment of individual goals and in the formulation of the appropriate investment policy. Sure, this may not be an exercise that individuals enjoy – advisors do not often enjoy it any more than their clients. Yet, as Yogi Berra is quoted as saying: “If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there!” If you do not have a target asset or strategy allocation that is designed to meet your goals over time, what are the odds you will, in fact, meet them? Thus, individuals must recognize the importance of serious introspection to formulate their goals with some degree of granularity; correspondingly, advisors need to feel responsible for helping individuals in that endeavor that is not natural to many of them. In short, I feel it is important to recognize that the current tendency is fraught with danger: one misses the point when considering some form of “average” goal, rather than a list of actual goals, and constructing an “average risk profile” from the top down, rather than a bottom-up formulation of risk based on the risk associated with each goal and each time horizon. It exposes the industry to the real risk of not satisfying its clients. A corollary is that clients, too, must require their advisors to recognize that they, the affluent, are different; that they are no single-purpose institution; and that they need a tailored approach. It would really be too bad if individuals and families were to keep missing their goals and failing to “connect” with their wealth, simply because their advisors prefer to remain in the comfortable preserve of institutional asset management rather than adopt a framework explicitly designed around the specific nature of individual wealth management needs.

Third, I feel that the industry needs to consider restructuring. This may be the most controversial part of this book. Consider the difference you observe when comparing a lawyer's office, a medical practice, and the office of an investment advisor. The former two appear quite leveraged, with very few people at the top of the pyramid and a number of associates helping with the tasks that can be delegated. The latter typically comprises a number of senior people, the advisors, and very few other people. Not surprisingly, advisory practices tend to suffer from very low margins. As such, this gives rise to the obvious temptation to add to revenues by receiving various forms of supplementary fees, for instance. Steve Lockshin, in his book Get Wise to Your Advisor,3 offered the thought that these could easily be called kickbacks! Now, how can an advisor claim to be fully objective and solely dedicated to the client – each client – if he or she is receiving some compensation from people he will recommend to be hired? How willing will they be to recommend that someone who has paid them in some way be fired? Others try to raise profitability by degrading the client experience or by starting to accept certain forms of conflicts of interest; both should be viewed as highly unsatisfactory, as profitability is increased at the expense of the client, rather than by active internal management efforts. Consider an alternative that is equally potent and much more intellectually satisfying: How about an approach to raising margins that would rely on creating more internal operational efficiencies within the firm?

In conclusion, let me make two quick points and offer a disclaimer. This is an industry in transformation. In fact, you could even argue that this has been an industry being created before our eyes; in that frame of reference, creation continues. Thus, I certainly do not want to impugn the motives of certain actors and set them up as contrary examples vis-à-vis others who would be viewed as the pious alternatives. Second, industries that suffer from relatively poor profitability will naturally find it harder to change: change costs money and they have little excess money to spare to finance change and to live through the initially adverse consequences that might result. In short, I offer opinions and thoughts here that I have had a chance to test in the field. Yet, because of the very limited nature of the list of clients that we have served over the last fifteen years or so, and because of my strong belief that Templeton's comment extends way beyond investment management, I want to offer these thoughts with a great deal of humility. I am convinced that they are taking us in the “right” direction, but if I am wrong, I must honestly admit that it will not be the first time I was wrong!

I wanted to write this book because I feel that a lot more is needed to help individuals manage their wealth. I think that a crucial first step is to help individuals understand the relationship between their wealth and what it does for them, and this may well be the most important failing I noticed in our industry over the last twenty-five years or so. The next step relates to creating a process that allows that relationship to prosper and develop, with all the necessary feedback loops so that individuals can avoid the pitfalls that await them at each turn in the road. Finally, I strongly believe that this will likely lead to changes in the way the industry structures itself so that clients can be effectively served while other stakeholders can earn the rewards they deserve.

I therefore invite you, each reader, to make up your own mind. A lot of considerably more academic literature has been written on a number of these issues. Not all of it is unilaterally in agreement with my views. It takes more than one to make a market. Thus, read the book, ponder the insights, consider how they apply to your own circumstances, and then decide whether and, if so, how much of them make sense and should be integrated into whatever part of the integrated wealth management process most directly concerns you.

Jean L.P. Brunel, CFA

November 2014