It is time to retire generational labels of clients, particularly in public commentaries from the sector about how it views the market, the author of this article argues.

In this commentary, Stephen Harris (pictured below), the CEO of ClearView Financial Media – publisher of this news service – addresses the topic of whether the wealth management industry and financial services in general should walk away from generational labels.

If you have comments on this article, email the editors at tom.burroughes@wealthbriefing.com and amanda.cheesley@clearviewpublishing.com

Stephen Harris

Pick any generational label you like: Millennial, Gen X, Boomer, Gen Z, it hardly matters which. Say it out loud in a meeting and everyone nods, as if the word had told them something useful about the person sitting across the table. It hasn't. I was born in the last year of the baby boom, which means that I've spent the last decade watching "Boomer" become one of the few insults you can still throw at a stranger in polite company and expect to get away with. Nobody would say it about a race, a sex or a sexuality. Say it about a birth year, though, and it's practically a punchline.

That should bother us more than it does. Not because I'm precious about being teased, but because the same lazy thinking that makes "OK Boomer" feel harmless is exactly the thinking wealth managers use every day to build client strategy. And in an industry about to oversee the largest transfer of wealth in history, lazy thinking about who your clients are isn't a personality quirk. It's a business risk.

A generation is one fact about you, not a description of you
What strikes me most is this: being born in a particular year is one input into a life, not a blueprint for it. Two people born six months apart can live entirely different lives shaped by class, geography, family, temperament, luck and a hundred other forces that have nothing to do with which decade they happened to arrive in. Lumping them together because of shared timing and calling it insight is, in my view, exactly the kind of mistake we'd reject instantly if applied to any other trait someone didn't choose. Nobody picks their birth year any more than they pick their race or their sex, which is precisely why casual generational stereotyping deserves the same scrutiny we'd give any other prejudice, even if the law hasn't caught up to calling it that.

It's lazy marketing dressed up as insight
"Gen Z wants purpose-driven investing." "Gen X is the sandwich generation, stretched thin." "Boomers are resistant to digital." Say it enough times in a pitch deck and it starts to sound like research. It isn't. It's a shortcut, a way to avoid the harder work of finding out what an individual client actually wants, which requires asking them rather than assuming it from an actuarial table. Marketing to a generation is marketing to nobody in particular, dressed up as if it's marketing to everybody in that cohort.

And it makes the thinking lazy too
The marketing problem is really a symptom of something worse, since once you've got a label, you stop looking. "This client is a Millennial, so..." becomes a substitute for finding out. That's not analysis. It's prejudice with better branding, and wealth managers who would never dream of making assumptions about a client based on their background somehow think it's fine to make nearly identical assumptions based on the year stamped on their birth certificate.

The industry is already building whole strategies on the label
This isn't a hypothetical tendency, at least not as I read the industry. In 2022, UBS paid $1.4 billion to acquire Wealthfront, specifically to reach what it called "Millennial and Gen Z affluent investors," treating the two cohorts as a single addressable segment rather than millions of individuals with wildly different circumstances. 

I've seen the same pattern echoed by senior figures in the Gulf's private banking sector: Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank's head of wealth management has argued that banks "must completely rethink their approach" specifically because of what an entire generation supposedly "demands," while Julius Baer has partnered with the DIFC Innovation Hub on a white paper devoted to how the coming generational handover should reshape service design. These are not fringe ideas. They are boardroom strategy, built on the premise that a birth cohort is itself a client segment.

If a firm insists on generalizing, at least do it properly, and keep it in-house
None of this means generational research has no place at all. If banks and wealth managers want to make wide-ranging assumptions about client groupings based on age, they should at least have the good sense to keep that thinking internally based rather than parading it in front of the client. Used responsibly, it might mean trying to distil the genuine moral, ethical or world views that tend to cluster around a generation's shared formative experiences, not the superficial habits (a preference for apps, a taste for a particular investment theme) that current generational marketing tends to reach for. 

That kind of deeper, more careful research could inform more nuanced and, frankly, more welcome client and prospect messaging, precisely because it wouldn't announce itself as a generational label at all. The moment a firm turns that internal research into a client-facing script ("as a Millennial, you probably...") it has thrown away whatever nuance it built and handed the client a stereotype instead.

The stakes are about to get very real
None of this would matter much if it were confined to marketing copy. But the world is entering what UBS itself has called an historic intergenerational wealth transfer, with an estimated $83 trillion expected to pass from Baby Boomers and older entrepreneurs to their children and grandchildren over the next two decades. 

The clients on the receiving end of that transfer will not be a homogeneous cohort who all want the same things because they were born within the same sixteen-year window. 

In my experience, they will be individuals first and foremost: some grieving, some relieved, some anxious, some ambitious, some cautious, some reckless, in combinations that owe far more to their own circumstances than to their birth year.

Each of them deserves to be understood on their own terms at exactly the moment they are making some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives.

A wealth manager who greets that moment with a generational script instead of a genuine conversation isn't just being a bit clumsy. In my view, they are misreading the client entirely, and doing so at the worst possible time, with the largest amount of money our industry has ever seen in play. What I perceive happening here isn't a small commercial slip. It's a client relationship ending before it's begun, and in a business built entirely on relationships, that's about as terminal a mistake as it gets.

Retire the generational labels. Get to know the client in front of you instead. It was always going to be better advice. It's about to become existential.