Best & Worst Full-Service Wealth Management Firms Ranked by Investors

Investors are generally feeling good about their advisors these days, though pockets of weakness exist, J.D. Power reported Thursday.

Overall investor satisfaction with full-service investment advisors stands at 735 on a 1,000-point scale, up eight points from a year ago, according to the latest U.S. Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study. J.D. Power said this increase is consistent with the long-term trend of investor satisfaction moving in concert with stock market performance.

But it also points up a potential risk factor for advisors whose perceived value is dependent on market forces.

"It is conventional wisdom that investor satisfaction tracks closely with stock market performance, but for advisors who want to build long-term, sustainable relationships that can weather good markets and bad, they will need to build a deeper level of engagement with clients," Craig Martin, global head of wealth and lending intelligence at J.D. Power, said in a statement.

Martin said advisors must be particularly attentive to younger investors whose loyalty tracks lower than that of other generations. "Advisors will need to adjust their approach to meaningfully connect with younger investors or risk a major outflow of assets in coming years."

J.D. Power fielded the study from January 2023 through January 2024, and received responses from 9,951 investors who work directly with a dedicated financial advisor or team of advisors.

Satisfaction Factors

The survey found that intended attrition rates tend to be very low among clients with advisors, especially among Gen Xers and older clients. But millennials — particularly more affluent ones — are a different matter.

Thirty-six percent of millennial respondents with upward of $1 million in investable assets said they would likely change firms in the next year. One possible reason is that 70% of well-off millennials also work with a secondary firm, significantly more so than their older affluent counterparts.

Technology and digital solutions increasingly enable advisors to become more efficient and empower more proactive client engagement. The survey found that 86% of advised clients logged into their account on their firm's site in the past 12 months, and 60% logged onto the mobile app.

Not only that, advisors who make an effort to help clients understand and engage with digital channels consistently drive higher levels of investor satisfaction. In contrast, clients have a more negative perception of advisors who fail to clearly explain digital options, and give them half the number of referrals they do their more digitally supportive peers.

As AI-enabled investment advisory solutions rapidly gain traction in the marketplace, advisors need to be clear on what differentiates them. Consider that in 2024, 41% of advised clients' experiences fall into the transactional category on the J.D. Power Advisory Continuum.

The Advisor Continuum measures the effectiveness of advice delivery on a scale that extends from transactional through client-centric to comprehensive, thereby indicating a progression from basic to exceptional service.

Clients in the transactional category are put at the greatest risk by technology-enabled solutions that can effectively compete on price and efficiency, J.D. Power said.

It said delivering truly personalized guidance that addresses a client's unique goals and challenges, major life changes and investment strategies that transcend returns are important ways to insulate the business from future competitive threats.

Here are the results of the latest Full-Service Investor Satisfaction Study. Click on the images to enlarge.