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After the Consumer Gold Rush: Why Wealth-Tech is Fintech's Next Frontier

  • rozemarijn.de.neve
  • Oct 3
  • 5 min read

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Fintech pioneers who revolutionised consumer banking are now turning their attention to the antiquated world of private wealth management


The Three-Click Tesla Problem


A wealthy client can order a Tesla in three clicks on his phone, but adjusting his investment portfolio takes three weeks of phone calls, emails, and scanned forms. This grim reality, shared by David Brear, group CEO of consultancy 11:FS, encapsulates the paradox facing Europe's high net worth (HNW) individuals in 2025.


While Monzo, Starling, Revolut, and N26 have transformed consumer banking into a seamless digital experience, the world of private wealth management remains stubbornly analogue. Now, the same fintech pioneers who disrupted retail banking are setting their sights on a much larger prize: the £5.5 trillion that will change hands between generations in the UK and EU by 2030.


The Consumer Banking Revolution: Mission Complete


The consumer fintech revolution has reached its saturation point. In 2024, the value of investments into UK tech companies plummeted by 36% to £18.5bn (Beauhurst, 2025). The consumer banking market has been thoroughly disrupted, margins squeezed, and incumbents forced to modernise.


Indeed, Revolut has reached a stage of growth where it can offer a private banking offering for wealthy individuals (Beauhurst, 2025), signalling that even consumer-focused challengers recognise where the next opportunity lies.


The question facing fintech innovators is clear: where next?


The £5.5 Trillion Opportunity


The answer lies in the vast, underserved wealth management sector. The global combined corporate and private balance sheet has ballooned in the last 20 years, from net worth and liabilities of €450 trillion in 2000 to €1,530 trillion in 2020 (McKinsey, 2023). In the UK alone, over £1.3 trillion sits in wealth management, with an estimated £5.5 trillion set to pass between generations by 2030.


Yet this enormous market operates on technology and processes that would be unrecognisable to users of modern consumer banking apps.


"It Was Faxed in from the 1990s"


The problems facing HNW individuals read like a catalogue of banking archaeology:

Manual onboarding and KYC: Private banks often require weeks of paperwork for account setup, contrasting sharply with challenger banks' instant digital onboarding.

Inefficient reporting: Portfolio statements still arrive as mailed documents or PDF attachments with delayed information, lacking real-time access.

Hidden fees and opacity: 78% of the surveyed banks in the US believe digital transformation is essential to meet changing customer expectations (KPMG via McKinsey, 2023), yet most private banks still operate with opaque fee structures.


David Brear of 11:FS doesn't mince words: "The likes of Monzo and Starling are light-years ahead for basic retail banking but when high net worth individuals graduate to the organisations looking to serve them, they are often full of hidden fees, archaic account opening and reporting that looks as if it was faxed in from the 1990s."


Europe's New Wealth-Tech Vanguard


The response to this opportunity has been swift and ambitious. Leading the charge is Project Arnaud, spearheaded by Jason Bates (co-founder of Monzo and Starling), David Brear (11:FS), and Max Koretskiy (Blackshield Capital). With £50 million already earmarked and another investment round imminent, they're building what they call "Monzo for HNWs."

Max Koretskiy frames the opportunity: "The largest wealth transfer in history is colliding with rising client expectations, shaped by consumer tech. Over £1 trillion will change hands over the 2020s in the UK alone, resulting in a five times increase of wealth held by millennials."


Not to be outdone, Anthony Thomson, founder of Metro Bank and Atom Bank, is launching the Family Offices Bank with a targeted go-live in late 2026. The Family Offices Bank executives include ex-CEO of Virgin Money Paul Pester, ex-CFO of Commonwealth Bank of Australia Stuart Grimshaw, Barclays 19-year veteran Samantha Bamert & ex-CTO of UK Monument Bank Sudip Dasgupta (Caproasia, 2025).


Thomson's research revealed a clear message from family offices worldwide: "Their needs have evolved but their banks haven't. Too many family offices and UHNWIs are oversold, underserved, misunderstood, or treated like an afterthought."


Across Europe, the momentum is building:

  • Altoo (Switzerland): A Zug-based fintech providing an independent digital wealth platform specifically for HNWs and family offices, focusing on portfolio consolidation and reporting: areas where traditional private banks still rely on PDFs and legacy portals.

  • Finary (France): A Paris-based platform for affluent investors and family offices, providing modern tools for tracking and analysing assets across multiple banks and geographies in a single digital dashboard.

  • Finlight (UK): A digital operating system for family offices that integrates risk, performance, reporting, and operations, helping wealthy clients avoid the inefficiencies of fragmented, manual wealth management processes.


The Millennial Catalyst


The urgency for change is driven by a generational shift. According to Deloitte's 2023 Global Wealth Management Study, 67% of HNW clients under 40 consider leaving their wealth manager due to poor digital experience. Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2024 found that 71% of millennial HNWs expect digital-first engagement, compared with only 27% satisfaction with current wealth manager platforms.

This isn't just about convenience; it's about fundamental expectations. The next generation of wealth holders are digitally native. They expect 24/7 mobile access, automated rebalancing, ESG integration, and transparent fee structures as standard, not luxury features.

Furthermore, PwC's Future of Private Banking Report delivered this sobering statistic: over 70% of private banks in Europe are running on platforms that are 15+ years old. The technology gap between what clients expect and what banks deliver has never been wider.


The Race Against Time


The window for transformation is narrowing. Private banks are pouring money into protective measures; industry experts predict spending on financial cybersecurity will top $43 billion by 2026 (Global Finance Magazine, 2025), yet much of this investment goes towards patching legacy systems rather than fundamental modernisation.


Traditional private banks face a choice: modernise rapidly or watch as nimble wealth-tech startups capture the most valuable clients of the next generation. As Ryan Lemand, co-founder and CEO of Neovision Wealth Management, notes: "Given that family offices control assets worth more than $6 trillion globally, any shift in this dynamic could seriously impact bank revenues" (Global Finance Magazine, 2025).


The consumer fintech revolution took less than a decade to transform retail banking beyond recognition. With trillions at stake and a new generation of wealth holders demanding change, the wealth-tech revolution promises to move even faster.


For Europe's HNW individuals, the message is clear: the same innovation that transformed consumer banking is finally coming to private wealth. The only question is whether traditional banks will lead this transformation or become its casualties.



The Next Chapter of Fintech Innovation Needs a New Narrative


At Contentifai, we understand that wealth-tech isn't just about digitising old processes; it's about reimagining how technology serves human ambition at scale. Just as Project Arnaud and Family Offices Bank are bridging the gap between Tesla-speed consumer tech and fax-era private banking, we bridge the gap between complex financial innovation and compelling human stories. Our human+AI content approach helps wealth-tech pioneers and forward-thinking financial institutions articulate not just their technological advantages, but the fundamental shift they're bringing to how wealth is managed, preserved, and transferred across generations.

Ready to position your firm at the forefront of the wealth-tech revolution? Let's craft content that speaks to both the innovators disrupting the industry and the sophisticated clients demanding change.


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