When customers at your financial institution have successfully built up their legacy, they might assume these resources will be enjoyed by their great-grandchildren and beyond—but that’s rarely the case. Instead, roughly 90% of all wealthy families lose that wealth in just three generations.

That loss of capital isn’t just a tragedy for the families and communities you serve. It represents a serious challenge for your institutional stability and diminished growth opportunities. The simple fact is, customers who are successful from one generation to the next with your bank are much more likely to be loyal. That relationship begins with providing them with the tools to tackle multi-generational wealth planning—and it leads to higher deposit levels and greater engagement with your services. 

Of course, it’s not as simple as offering a user-friendly app and helping families refinance a mortgage. Businesses will need to engage with new digital services and partnerships that engage customers in long-range banking habits. Life planning, succession support for business owners, and digital platforms that incorporate families will all be at the heart of tomorrow’s successful banking strategies. 

Understanding Multi-Generational Wealth Planning

It’s critical for banks to realize that building wealth and helping the next generation maintain it are not the same activities. Traditional banking services like loans, investment counseling, and retirement planning can all be very rewarding, but if there’s no planning and engagement with beneficiaries and business successors, all that work can vanish quickly. 

That’s bad for the long-term health of banks as well as their customers. The fact is, banks benefit from enriching their customers, and when they place generational wealth transference at the center of their strategy, they’re investing in their clients, their communities, and their business all at once. 

Laying the Foundation for Long-Term Banking Relationships

Starting the conversation about multi-generational wealth planning needs to be a proactive task for banks—even the most successful clients may not understand what it takes to help their children and successors capitalize on their life’s work. Getting it right means developing conversations and engaging in activities that promote practical relationships among family members and their financial institutions and offering services and digital platforms that empower them to plan and organize for the future. 

Get the Next Generation Involved Early

No matter how much work people put into their personal and business succession plans, the long-term success or failure will ultimately depend on their beneficiaries. Unfortunately, in the United States, just 57% of adults are financially literate. Meanwhile, only 25% of U.S. teenagers are confident in their knowledge of personal finance. Additionally, more than half of all surveyed members of Gen Z lacked knowledge of products such as Roth IRAs and CDs.

Banks need to treat educating and supporting potential beneficiaries long before a wealth transfer is on the horizon as an investment, not a tedious task. This includes counseling parents and grandparents to include their family in important discussions and providing software and services that support the process. While these things require time and money to implement, the return on the investment has the potential to carry on for decades to come.

Expand Your Service Line

While banks are very good at transferring accounts from one family member to another, they are notoriously ill-equipped to help with life planning and SMB succession services. In many cases, all they offer their customers are some online tips and a few printed checklists. 

Financial institutions will need to expand and develop their services in both areas to support sustainable wealth-building habits, and fintech partnerships offer some of the highest value and ROI. Software platforms that provide life and succession planning services can be easily onboarded and incorporated into existing strategies without expensive development costs. 

Kickstarting Multi-Generational Wealth Planning with Paige

Paige is a comprehensive digital platform delivering multi-generational wealth planning services that are intuitive, easy to use, and provide banks with new and valuable ways to connect with their customers. Unlike most fintechs, Paige’s life planning and SMB succession platform is relationship-driven, and it allows financial institutions to adopt a growth-oriented strategy that’s rooted in the needs of the people they serve. 

Of course, that emphasis on interpersonal connections doesn’t come at the expense of performance. Banks that partner with Paige see returns on the investment of 300% or more, and because it focuses on multi-generational wealth building and customer loyalty, those benefits form the foundation of your bank’s future stability and success. 

Life Planning Services

Paige helps individuals and families manage their:

• Documents and Data. Paige gives families a secure and sharable place to keep all their important financial information like account numbers, passwords, etc. Not only does it make it easy for beneficiaries to access, but it supports conversations about how various resources are intended to be used by them.
• Estate Details. Estate planning is another complex process, as it requires people to keep track of broker information, inventories, insurance details, deeds, and more. Paige can help people hang on to these details, as well as open conversations about future goals and plans.
• Messages and Memories. Paige can safely store digital photos and videos so families can preserve their important content and share valuable advice. This is a feature that is particularly useful for promoting multi-generational engagement and can act as a bridge to larger discussions. 

SMB Succession Planning

However, Paige doesn’t stop there—two-thirds of all SMBs don’t have a plan for the future, either. That’s why we assist these businesses with:

• Details and Assets. A successful and rewarding business succession requires everyone to be on the same page.Paige makes it easy to coordinate, discuss future plans, and ensure that important resources are allocated and understood.
• Vital Documents. Like personal legacy and estate planning, preparing for a business’s future means keeping track of many different documents. Paige makes it easy for business owners to make their business as transparent as possible for successors and set them up for financial success on day 1. 
• Succession Strategies. Paige makes it easy for current owners to develop and share their succession strategy so future leadership has the best chance to maintain and grow the business. 

Prepare for the Future With Paige

It’s always a good time for your bank to help people plan for their financial futures. Even so, multi-generational wealth planning services could have a particularly dramatic impact on your financial institution in the relatively near future. Over the next 25 years, Millennials are poised to inherit $72.6 trillion from their parents and grandparents, and banks that invest in preparing them to build on that success today will capitalize on that effort tomorrow. 

With this much money set to change hands, financial institutions have never had a better opportunity to focus on life planning and succession to build custom relationships that will last for generations. If you’re interested in delivering these services to your bank’s clients, Paige’s platform is exactly what you need. Learn more about what we can do for you by setting up a demo today!