OAKS, PA — SEI (NASDAQ: SEIC) found that 88% of surveyed high-net-worth investors keep assets away from their primary financial adviser, exposing a potential source of organic growth for advisory firms that can demonstrate financial benefits from managing assets across an entire household.
The findings also identified a disconnect between advisers’ efforts to gather more client assets and what investors report hearing from them. While 95% of surveyed advisers stated that they actively seek to consolidate client assets, 71% of investors reported that their adviser had never asked to manage a greater share of their wealth.
Among the high-net-worth investors surveyed, 47% had no more than three-quarters of their assets with their primary adviser.
Tax savings emerged as the strongest identified incentive for consolidation. Forty-six percent of investors stated that tax savings would motivate them to move more assets to their primary adviser, followed by increased retirement income and lower fees.
More than one-third stated they would be highly likely to transfer additional assets within a year if their adviser demonstrated the dollar amount they could save on taxes.
That opportunity is constrained by advisers’ ability to quantify those benefits. Only 49% stated they can measure the financial benefit of every household portfolio-management practice, with centralized data, visibility across client accounts and staffing among the obstacles identified in the research.
SEI’s research examined household portfolio management, also known as a unified managed household, which coordinates assets across multiple accounts as a single portfolio. The approach can incorporate asset location, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting, withdrawal planning and other tax-management strategies.
Eighty-one percent of advisers stated that they tell clients they offer household portfolio management.
Providing those services across multiple accounts can require substantial adviser resources. Advisers offering asset location, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting and tax-smart withdrawals reported spending an average 48 hours a month on related work.
The workload increased to 65 hours monthly among advisers with the largest books of business and 67 hours among those serving the wealthiest clients. Thirty percent of advisers identified insufficient technology as an obstacle to providing or expanding household portfolio management.
“Our research found a striking disconnect between what advisors believe they are communicating and what investors are actually hearing,” Arthur Worthington, SEI senior managing director of strategic business development and integration, stated.
Worthington pointed to the gap between investors’ willingness to consolidate assets when shown measurable tax savings and advisers’ ability to quantify those benefits as an opportunity for firms to strengthen client relationships and increase assets under management.
SEI surveyed 518 financial advisers about household portfolio management from Jan. 27 through Jan. 29, 2026. FUSE Research Network LLC conducted the survey.
The advisers had an average age of 55 and served clients with an average net worth of $2.9 million. Average firm assets under management were $523 million for advisers working on teams and $205 million for those in individual practices.
A separate YouGov survey for SEI questioned 302 U.S. adults from April 24 through April 30, 2026. Respondents were ages 50 to 70, worked with a financial adviser and had at least $1 million in investable assets.
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