Advisers say they ask for more assets; 71% of clients say they were never asked

Three recently published studies reported by PLANADVISER converge on one gap in the household-consolidation pitch: advisers say they are selling it, and the clients say nobody asked.

SEI Investments' survey of 518 financial advisers found that 95% actively sought to consolidate client assets and that 81% offered household portfolio management; a separate SEI survey of 302 investors aged 50 to 70 with at least $1 million in investable assets found that 71% said their adviser had never asked to manage a larger share of what they own. The two groups were surveyed independently, which makes the comparison directional rather than a matched pair, but the direction is consistent.

The demand looks real: asked what would motivate consolidation, 46% of the investors named tax savings, 42% higher retirement income and 38% lower fees, and delivering those three things is exactly the household-planning work only 49% of advisers said they could quantify across all client accounts. Another 38% said they could not quantify it at all, and 13% said they did not offer the service. Investors told SEI they would move more assets when the benefit could be clearly quantified; set that against the 37% of advisers who attributed their scaling difficulties to a lack of client interest, and the stated diagnosis looks like the wrong one.

The labor load explains the hesitation: advisers running tax-smart withdrawal strategies, asset location and household rebalancing reported spending 48 hours a month on them—longer than an average work week—and when asked what blocked them from scaling, 30% cited a lack of automation technology and 22% insufficient staffing. The machinery problem and the people problem are arriving together at a moment when Cerulli counts roughly 35% of advisers heading for retirement inside a decade.

Cerulli data from a decade of practice research has been clear that planning changes client behavior; this run of studies is the first in a while to price what the planning itself costs the adviser.

The Oasis Group's white paper, which cites a 2025 Cerulli Associates report putting adviser administrative time at nine hours a week, argues that meeting management should be run as an end-to-end business process—booking and scheduling, capture and note-taking, post-meeting follow-up—rather than a set of disconnected tasks. That is the unglamorous half of the consolidation story, and it is where the pitch will be won or lost.

Firms have spent years marketing wallet share. The next round goes to whoever prices and staffs the 48 hours a month that produces it; the firms still treating household planning as a promise rather than a line item will keep selling the intention while the households they want say no one asked.