Benchmarking Personal Wealth Management in Financial Institutions

Cetera commissioned Kehrer Group to assess how these initiatives are working relative to the traditional approach of wealth management silos with (sometimes contested) client segmentation.

Why not aggregate existing benchmarks? The services that benchmark Investment Services or Trust provide useful benchmarks of these individual businesses, but there does not appear to be a service that benchmarks Personal Wealth Management in financial institutions.

To isolate Personal Wealth Management,  and exclude activities such as Institutional Trust and Retirement Plan Administration across the enterprise, requires a new survey, and significant effort by the institution, to extract the information we need from the existing business reporting.

Research Methodology

Cetera commissioned Kehrer Group to launch a test survey last year to:

• Determine whether firms would, and could, provide the detailed information needed to benchmark personal wealth management;
• Identify the best way to capture the information – structured or open-ended quereporstionnaire, executive interview, etc.; and
• Fine tune the survey language to communicate successfully across a landscape of different business models and inconsistent definitions of roles.

Survey Objectives

• Provide some useful initial benchmarks from a limited sample.
• Begin the process of understanding how the various elements of personal wealth management interact with each other and illuminate best practices.
• Demonstrate a ”proof of concept” to convince our community that this benchmarking study is feasible and worth supporting.
• Set the stage for a survey during 2026 with broad enough participation to be representative of the current state of personal wealth management in financial institutions.