Guest: Robert Crossley, Head of Industry Research at Franklin Templeton.
In a nutshell: Automatic retirement at 65. Living off a generous pension and Social Security and saving the rest. Perpetually building wealth via a 60/40 portfolio. An endless weekend. One vacation after another.
Would this retirement plan work for many of your clients who are 60 and older?
Will this plan work for their kids? Their grandkids?
The current retirement system was designed for a stable, employer-based world. And that world is disappearing. Advisors who don’t want to disappear with it need to adapt to a new reality: multiple career arcs, increased longevity, higher costs of living, cycling in and out of the workforce, and income mattering more than accumulation.
On today’s show, Robert Crossley digs into Franklin Templeton’s massive new research on retirement, which involved interviewing participants representing over $18 trillion in assets to understand how demographics, technology, and investor behavior are colliding to reshape the retirement ecosystem.
.Robert Crossley and I discuss:
- Why traditional models of planning for retirement fail to meet the personalized needs of a gig economy workforce.
- How neobrokers and holistic fintech platforms are redefining advisor-client relationships.
- Generational differences in how income and investment assets are prioritized.
- Why Millennials and Gen Z are abandoning product-based expertise in favor of community validation and social media influencers.
- How the transition from fragmented, siloed accounts to integrated digital wallets will change the way individuals — and advisors — manage personal balance sheets.
- Why the advisor of the future must move upstream to advise on the flow of savings (including new assets like credit card points and stablecoin yields) rather than just managing the stock of savings and investments.
- Will smart contracts and AI agents eventually automate key financial decisions and cut traditional advisors out of the loop?
- How to evolve from an asset manager into a full-service financial concierge.
Robert Crossley on the changing nature of financial trust:
“ When you think about a portfolio for a baby boomer, the number one purpose of that portfolio is wealth accumulation and wealth preservation. For younger generations, accumulation is number four. The number one priority is income. They can’t afford to live in the same way, and the very different formative experiences that baby boomers have had from younger generations, politically, economically, socially, technologically, that’s translated into very, very different attitudes to wealth and to saving. There’s a really nice study that Bank of America do every year. Over 55% of people over the age of 43 allocate to stocks. Under the age of 43, only 25% are buying equities. So the question is, what are they buying? What do they believe will give them the long-term returns they think they need for their retirement? It’s much, much more skewed away from public equities and toward the next generation of alternatives.
“It’s not just what they trust, it’s how they trust and who they trust. 90% of Gen Z, 72% of millennials, get their financial information from social media. The top 10 US finfluencers reach about 113 million people. A third of Gen Z watch fintechs, 80% of them take action based on those fintechs. Now, what’s really going on here is that there’s a change in the trust and decision making model of generations. There’s a disconnect between how decisions get made. Whether it’s in public or it’s in private, whether it’s peer driven or the traditional model of it being product driven and expert driven, and validation comes from a community rather than from an individual. So the point that gets missed here is that at a similar stage of life, our children will have similar needs to us, but who they trust to meet those needs and what they trust to meet those needs will become, and is, completely different.”
Robert Crossley on how wallets will replace accounts:
“Think about your portfolio today. Your portfolio is a fiction. The only thing which unites everything in your portfolio is that you own it. It’s across all these different systems. It’s siloed, it’s non-interoperable, it’s opaque. In the world that we’re moving towards very quickly, everything will be in your wallet. You’ll have a single point of control for all of your assets that’s addressable in the same place. And advisors and incumbents will compete with fintechs and neobrokers to service that wallet. What you’re going to see is a convergence of your whole life in your wallet. Your whole personal balance sheet will be integrated in and managed in that wallet.”
Robert Crossley on advising with the flow:
“ What open banking has done is enable the provision of bite-sized services, offered at the point of need when it comes into existence, when you’re just about to pay, not tied to anything else. For example, neobrokers offering credit cards and debit cards and bringing you into their ecosystem.
“The link to retirement of all of this, and the future of the advisor, is that how you spend your money matters. Which credit card you use, whether it’s how many points you get, whether it’s cash, etc. The way that you choose to pay has a bearing on your purchasing power. So in the future, an advisor is probably going to want to advise on maximizing the purchasing power of a transaction: in other words, advising the flow of savings, not just a stock of savings. Moving upstream in the capital flow, instead of just waiting to manage the pool of money that’s allocated to investment. If you can advise on the flow of savings or the flow of income upstream, that puts you or a neobroker or a fintech in a very, very powerful position indeed. So the advisor in the future is going to have to think much more holistically about the individual. Think about broadening their focus from just investment and just traditional investment to a much broader range of assets, but also advising on the flow of savings. And also, if they’re not going to be disintermediated by technology, they’ll have to use technology and have to use AI to really actively manage the client journey and the investment journey and not cede the ground to the fintechs.”
