Hybrid advice today: digitally supported interaction between client adviser and clients
In the last three years, the concept of hybrid advice has emerged as a cornerstone of modern wealth management, ensuring seamless interaction between client advisers and their clients. The hybrid Advisery model leverages technology to create flexible user journeys that ensure a smooth interplay between personal client-adviser meetings and digital self-service interactions conducted by clients from anywhere and at any time. This enables a tailored experience, allowing clients to access and complete information as well as make and confirm decisions in self-service channels independently, while maintaining the option to easily engage with a client adviser if needed.
The hybrid formula can vary significantly depending on a bank's strategy, client segments, and technology infrastructure, but its goal is consistent: delivering a cohesive omnichannel experience that fosters effective collaboration between client advisers and clients, ensuring all users always have the same data at their fingertips across all channels.
A shifting landscape: the evolving demands of a new client generation
The push towards hybrid advice is not just a passing trend, it reflects a fundamental change driven by two major forces: demographic factors and technological advancements. According to UBS’s Global Wealth Report 2024, a record sum of approximately US$83.5 trillion is expected to be passed between generations globally within the next 20 to 25 years. This historic shift of wealth is known as the Great Wealth Transfer. The baby boomers, who traditionally relied heavily on personal advisers, are being replaced by younger, more tech-savvy generations that are reshaping the financial landscape with their expectations of self-service and instant access to information. These digital natives, particularly Gen Z and millennials, are accustomed to 24/7 convenience in other areas of life – from online shopping to media streaming – and expect the same flexibility and control when it comes to their finances.
However, while this clientele values autonomy and feels comfortable with technology in managing everyday information needs, many of them lack financial literacy and actual investment experience, just as the older generations of clients did. Consequently, if they are left alone in the self-service channel as execution-only, they risk being overwhelmed by the complexity and implications of financial decisions. For example, when navigating complex financial products or in times of market fluctuations or special life situations, most clients will want to seek the expert guidance of an experienced client adviser, providing factual as well as emotional affirmation in the decision-making process.
The key to a successful hybrid Advisery model lies in balancing self-service options with professional guidance by offering scalable digital tools for basic needs while reserving human expertise for intricate, key moment scenarios. Thus, the role of the adviser will not be replaced by technology, but rather, complemented by it.
Hybrid advice 2.0: embedding AI agents in self-service channels
We believe the next era of hybrid advice – hybrid advice 2.0 – will constitute a transformative step in the evolution of wealth management, with regard to both service capabilities and client experience. What used to be the seamless interaction between client adviser – as guardian of personalised and qualitative advice – and the self-service channel, will be transformed into an augmented service channel, embedding interactive information and eventually even Advisery services for end clients by means of virtual Advisery agents.
This will be made possible by generative and agentic artificial intelligence in combination with voice recognition and humanoid characters. Combining these technologies creates responsive speech-based, avatar-like agents, which will deliver an engaging and interactive user experience. The result will feel natural and humanlike in interaction – only lacking the actual physical presence of the client Adviser.
However, the human likeness of AI agents has its limits, as excessive anthropomorphising may trigger uncanny valley effects, causing users to feel confused or uncomfortable. Thus, finding the right balance is important to gain trust and acceptance of the virtual Advisery agents. We believe stylised human-like characters can bridge this gap.
In the context of financial services, the initial focus should be on pre-defined client journeys, such as opening a fund savings plan or a personalised next-best action recommendation in the context of clients with established investor profiles. We are convinced that in the near future, this will result in an engaging and intuitive self-service experience which will empower clients to take control of certain aspects of their finances, while maintaining the reassurance of expert oversight at the hand of tailored AI agents for specific use cases.
Once generative AI hallucinations have become better controllable, agentic AI has made further progress, and the initial adoption reluctance – among clients and institutions – has faded, we foresee that ultimately AI-driven agents will be used to analyse a client’s financial situation. They will guide clients through the risk capacity and risk tolerance profiling process based on visualised wealth simulations and step-by-step explanations. This way, AI agents can establish an investor profile with the client, which – in combination with a strategic asset allocation at institute level – provides the basis for regulatory-compliant advice.
The next key step in any Advisery process is portfolio optimisation. In short, it is a straightforward parametric or risk-based optimisation and has been standard for the past 20 years. The current challenge is not optimisation but defining a rule framework that avoids an unnecessarily large number of rebalances and hence transactions. Today, client advisers play a crucial role in integrating the existing client context and focus on improving the portfolio in context of the strategic asset allocation. Put differently, the client adviser facilitates an interactive dialogue with the client resulting in a balanced outcome that aligns the client’s preferences with the strategic asset allocation, while ensuring suitability of the advice being provided.
In the future, the key adoption criteria for AI agents in portfolio optimisation will be if they can replicate an equally qualified and engaging dialogue with the client, considering the client’s unique context as well as offering high-confidence explanations of how proposed changes add value.
Circling back to the initial example of a fund savings plan, success will be based on providing educational content in combination with an interactive discussion on why a fund savings plan makes sense in the specific client context. In the end, it is about explaining foregone opportunities and the impact of a consistent long-term investment approach, with AI agents assuring the client of the soundness of such a decision, just as a human adviser would in a personal meeting.
Customisation, scalability, and cost-efficiency
The key challenge in building a successful hybrid advice 2.0 offering is ensuring quality in the user experience. Initial negative experiences will delay adoption on an individual level significantly. Every financial institution serves various client segments, with different expectations and levels of financial literacy. AI agents will have to cater to a bank’s value proposition, offering, and client personas, taking into account factors such as financial goals, risk tolerance, and personal values.
Furthermore, Advisery avatars enable banks to serve a larger client base without a proportional increase in human resources. This reduces costs and allows banks to scale their offering to the growing affluent segment and unlocks a standardised proactive advice offering for the retail segment. AI-powered advice and personalisation will help banks meet the expectations of tech-savvy, self-service-oriented clients who demand 24/7 availability while remaining fee-conscious and less loyal to specific financial brands. The pressure on fees is no secret in the industry, and hybrid advice offers a way to cope with it while still maintaining a high standard of service. By delegating routine tasks and simple user journeys to AI agents, client advisers can focus on delivering value-added services, while clients enjoy the benefits of more efficient and lower-cost offerings.
We also believe high-net-worth individuals with complex, non-standard situations will continue to prefer the reassurance of personal, expert-backed advice. For these clients, holistic 360-degree Advisery services from client advisers are, and will remain, indispensable. However, the key point being, in this client segment and with these preferences two factors are ensured: AUM and client predisposition to pay – hence guaranteeing overall profitability.
In the end, the successful adoption of hybrid advice 2.0 will depend on how well financial institutions integrate technology into their Advisery services, and how well they manage client expectations in the context of their offerings without losing the human touch where client expectations demand it.
Building a winning proposition for the clients of tomorrow
Done well, hybrid advice 2.0 will be a game-changer for the wealth management industry. By combining digital tools, AI, and human expertise, financial institutions can create an augmented client experience that blends the efficiency of technology with the trust and personalisation of human interaction. This model not only promises to enhance client satisfaction and loyalty – it also sets banks apart in a highly competitive marketplace. By demonstrating a commitment to innovation, banks can attract the tech-savvy clientele of tomorrow and, in particular, build a winning proposition for the sizeable retail to affluent segment, thus ultimately unlocking and enabling growth in revenue.
As hybrid advice – augmented in parts by AI agents – continues to evolve, it will unlock substantial potential for banks and make wealth management more accessible, engaging, and effective for all.
Interested in reading the European WealthTech Landscape Report 2025? You can read the report online here.
About The European Wealth Landscape Report 2025
The European WealthTech Landscape Report 2025 is a new WealthTech Landscape Report from The Wealth Mosaic, focused on the wealth management sector in Europe.
With the rapid pace of change in financial services, understanding technology's impact on this sector is more crucial than ever. This Europe-focused Landscape Report features a series of insightful articles that explore the trends, challenges, and innovations surrounding technology adoption in wealth management. Contributions come from a range of organisations, including AWS, Croesus, Deloitte, ERI, EY, Fincite, Finfox, First Rate, Infront, Intellect Design Arena, Moneyfarm, Raise Partner and WealthOS.
The articles you will find within the report provide valuable perspectives on how technology is transforming the wealth management industry. They discuss various aspects of technology adoption, from the latest innovations to how firms can leverage technology to enhance client engagement, streamline operations, and comply with regulatory demands.
We trust you find this report invaluable to your business needs and supportive of your understanding of the fast-moving technology marketplace surrounding the European wealth management market.
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About The WealthTech Landscape Report Series
Our goal with our WealthTech Landscape Reports (WTLRs) is to collate relevant, insightful content and comments from both wealth managers and vendors operating in a specific region. Each WTLR is founded on a curated directory of hundreds of relevant technology and related solution providers to the business needs of the wealth management community in focus. The directory is supported by a rich variety of thought leadership articles and interviews with industry participants from both buy and sell side, plus a section of Solution Showcases. We also look at country, regional, and sectoral trends.
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