What happens when the most important conversation facing financial institutions finally gets the room it deserves? At the inaugural Empathy Unbound in NYC, leaders from across the industry came together to get honest about the Great Wealth Transfer. Not the dollar figures, but the relationships, the families, and the decisions that will determine who earns the next generation's trust and who loses it.
The thought leaders and panelists for the day included:
Elizabeth Duke: Former Federal Reserve Governor & Wells Fargo Board Chair
Nicholas Thompson: CEO, The Atlantic
Gerald Grant III: VP, G Financial Group; Author
Susan K. Neely: Former President & CEO, American Council of Life Insurers and Empathy Alliance Chair; Former White House Official
Rohan Malhotra: General Partner, Brewer Lane Ventures
Alison Kosik: Author, Journalist, and Former CNN Business Correspondent
The event also highlighted Empathy’s latest research: The Hidden Barriers to the Great Wealth Transfer.
The data made the case for urgency. The conversations made it personal. Here's what stayed.
Declare this a now problem and not a planning horizon
The average family expects the wealth transfer within the next seven years, and 60% anticipate it within ten.
The danger at the leadership level is treating the Great Wealth Transfer as a strategy topic — something to put on a roadmap, fund in a future budget cycle, or delegate to a working group. Every quarter that passes without action is a quarter in which relationships with the next generation are not being built. And once a transfer happens without those relationships in place, the assets are gone. Data shows 70–90% of inherited assets leave the parents’ advisor. That is the cost of waiting.
"It's a lot cheaper to just maintain a relationship with your existing clients and the next generation as opposed to trying to figure out how you're going to develop new assets to replace the ones that are walking out the door." - Gerald Grant III
The question for leaders is: Does the urgency of this show up in how you’re allocating resources, attention, and accountability right now?
Shift focus from the individual to the household
Most financial institutions focus on a single client, overlooking the broader family dynamic. Essential family context is often relegated to a notes field, where it can easily be lost.
The panel called this the single-player problem—and the fix isn't cultural; it's structural. Asking advisors to be more relationship-oriented without giving them the systems to support it is the wrong solution to the right problem. The real investment is in infrastructure: tools that treat the household as the client, not the individual, and make that context persistent across advisor transitions and generational change.
"How are you investing in relationship transfer and your distribution force? The advisors who are going to carry this industry forward need the tools, the technology, and the training. That decision doesn't happen at the advisor level." - Susan K. Neely
Women represent your single largest underserved market
Women will control the majority of the wealth being transferred. They are the most likely to serve as the executor. They are, in many households, already the CFO — managing the budget, the emergency fund, the credit rating. And yet they are 2–3 times more likely than their partners to be unaware of the family's financial situation. 72% don't have an estate plan.
The paradox isn't accidental. As Susan K. Neely put it, women often manage one side of the household finances while men handle the other — investments, legacy planning, and the advisor relationship. That is the gap your institution needs to close before the transfer forces the introduction.
This is primarily a product, distribution, and engagement design issue, though advisor training remains important. Are you providing entry points that meet women’s needs, with tools that allow them to become informed before their first meeting, at their preferred pace and format? Are advisors evaluated on “multiplayer” engagement or solely on AUM?
"Recognizing who's going to be calling the shots and thinking about how you want to engage her — that will be really, really important." - Susan K. Neely
Get ahead of AI now, or spend the next decade catching up
Elizabeth Duke has spent her career watching institutions navigate moments of rapid, irreversible change. Her advice on AI: start learning now, before you have to.
"I'm old enough to remember when nobody knew what the internet was. We went home, got a computer and a modem, and said, "Let’s find out what this does." That was the start of our bank learning how to use the web. And the early adopters were the ones who shaped what online banking was." - Elizabeth Duke
Nicholas Thompson made the same point from a different angle. At Empathy Unbound, he ran a live demonstration — a multi-agent AI system debating the right approach for a 78-year-old widow navigating her estate, with different AI characters presenting fiduciary, family dynamics, and estate-planning perspectives simultaneously.
He builds systems like this not because the answers are always right, but because staying at the edge of what's possible is what keeps him ahead of where the general consumer will be in a year.
"The interesting stuff isn't what everyone knows how to do. The interesting stuff is at the edge — and that's what every agent will be doing in a year." - Nicholas Thompson
AI doesn’t replace the advisor. It removes everything that gets in the way of the advisor doing their best work — the prep, the synthesis, the follow-up, the nudge at the right moment. It opens front doors that didn’t exist before, creating pathways to clients and demographics the traditional model never reached.
The ROI won’t appear in next quarter’s numbers, but build toward it anyway
The metrics for this work are real — AUM retention at the moment of transfer, Net Promoter Score at that same moment, share of wallet in years one and two after an inheritance — but they're lagging indicators. By the time they show up in the data, the relationship has already been won or lost.
Track the baseline. Invest before you have proof. The institutions moving fastest on multigenerational engagement, on women’s wealth, on AI-enabled advisor support are not doing it because the spreadsheet told them to. They believe it’s how this business will be run in ten years, and they’re not waiting for certainty before they start building.
"The leaders who move the fastest say: "I just believe this is how it's going to be done 10 years down the road." And many times we just have to prioritize a better experience for advisors and clients — and realize that that alone is really, really important." - Rohan Malhotra
The conversation continues
Empathy Unbound NYC brought together industry leaders for an afternoon focused on one of the financial industry's most significant shifts.
The day began with a deep dive into Empathy's latest research: The Hidden Barriers to the Great Wealth Transfer.
A panel moderated by Alison Kosik and featuring Gerald Grant III, Susan Neely, and Rohan Malhotra explored how the industry is responding to current challenges. A fireside chat between Nicholas Thompson and Elizabeth Duke addressed AI and leadership amid rapid change.
Join the conversation at our next event: Empathy Unbound Toronto.