Summary

Wealth Management Event 2026

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For the third edition of this event, leaders from across wealth and asset management gathered under the theme “Volatility, velocity and value: redesigning wealth management for the next generation.” The day moved from geopolitics and portfolio construction to the future of advice, AI and platforms, and closed with two very different client voices, a young entrepreneur managing his own wealth and a Rabobank strategist speaking for Gen Z, both pushing the industry to rethink who it serves and how.

This document summarizes the speeches, interviews, panels and cases at the event. It is not a verbatim transcript, but a paraphrased synopsis of the key points made. It has been prepared and published by Leaders in Finance. Please note that this summary was created with the help of AI tools. While care has been taken to ensure accuracy, the content may contain errors or omissions. For full clarity or specific details, please feel free to contact us.

Key takeaways

Geopolitics and resource security are now core portfolio inputs, not background risk. Geopolitical risk is measurably higher than before the pandemic, and speakers argued investors need to treat critical minerals, energy independence and defence spending as structural, strategic allocations, not tactical trades around crises.
Agentic AI threatens the client “stickiness” wealth managers have long relied on. Family offices are already interacting with AI agents today, and several speakers warned that as agents start shopping for the best return, price or tax outcome on a client’s behalf, loyalty built on inertia rather than genuine value will start to erode fast.
Being invisible to AI may become as risky as being invisible to Google once was. With AI-generated answers now appearing in roughly half of search results and only a handful of firms consistently recommended when people ask an LLM for a private bank, several speakers warned that firms need API-level connectivity and a deliberate presence in AI systems, not just a good website.

Value is shifting from siloed investment performance to a holistic view of a client’s whole life. From personal trainers to purpose-driven investing to one client who manages his own research but still leans on his banker for perspective, the recurring theme was that wealth management increasingly competes with how clients already use AI for everything else in their lives, all in one place.
Winning the next generation requires faster cycles and taking underserved segments seriously. Speakers pointed to mass affluent clients, women (who hold 38% of invested assets in Europe) and Gen Z as groups the industry has been slow to serve well, while fintech competitors ship new features every two weeks rather than every few months.

Opening – Marije Tolsma (moderator)

Marije, host of the day, opened with a personal reflection on growing up in a household that saved but never invested, framing investing as a deeply human act of transferring today’s energy and work into future security. She introduced the event’s three themes, volatility, velocity and value, and thanked partners EY, ObjectWay, Lepaya, DUFAS and the Dutch Banking Association.

Opening interview – Boudewijn Chalmers

Boudewijn Chalmers, Partner and Wealth and Asset Management Leader, EY, opened by arguing that the geopolitical and macroeconomic volatility dominating headlines is layered on top of the market volatility wealth managers already navigate daily. On velocity, he pointed to private markets, tokenization and AI as the areas moving fastest, predicting that AI will increasingly take over execution and administrative work, leaving humans focused on complex moments like a business sale or inheritance, while a more “agentified” model could squeeze out the classic execution-only and advisory tiers in between. On value, he framed pricing and business models, including a shift toward subscription-style pricing, as the open question every boardroom in the room should already be wrestling with.

Keynote (virtual) – Simona Gambarini

Simona Gambarini, Executive Director and Senior Market Strategist, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, joined remotely from London to present “A Fragmented World: geopolitics and portfolio implications.” She argued that geopolitical risk indices are now over 30% higher than pre-pandemic levels, reflecting a structural shift from globalization’s focus on efficiency to a new emphasis on national resilience, security of supply, and “just in case” over “just in time.” She mapped critical minerals such as copper, lithium and rare earths as the new strategic assets underpinning AI, defence and energy infrastructure, and compared the US, China, Europe and Japan on their readiness across energy, defence, critical minerals and AI, noting Europe’s exposure to energy imports and lag in AI as particular vulnerabilities. Using the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz as a live example, she showed how energy dependence translates directly into macro vulnerability, and closed with an investment framework built around climate transition, high public debt, aging demographics, new forms of finance, global fragmentation and evolving technology, concluding that portfolios need to be more resilient and diversified by driver rather than reliant on a single growth regime.

Speech – Jeroen van Wijngaarden

Jeroen van Wijngaarden, Director General, Dutch Fund and Asset Management Association (DUFAS), and formerly a Dutch member of parliament, argued that peace itself should now be understood as a strategic and economic asset rather than a permanent backdrop. Pointing to Russia’s war against Ukraine and instability around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, he argued that Europe can no longer assume automatic, sufficient American support, and that both capital and energy are increasingly being used as tools of geopolitical pressure. His practical call to action centered on mobilizing Europe’s large pools of savings into investment, including a possible Dutch tax incentive for investing in European assets and simpler retail investment products modeled on Sweden’s approach, while urging wealth managers to actively engage policymakers, citing the recent reversal of the Dutch Box 3 tax regime as proof that industry voices, channeled through trade associations, can and should shape regulation before it is finalized.

Interview – Maarten Edixhoven

Maarten Edixhoven, Chairman of the Management Board, Van Lanschot Kempen, discussed how perspectives on wealth are changing across generations. He argued that wealth fundamentally brings freedom and responsibility, and predicted that risk and return will increasingly be joined by a third dimension, whether framed as impact or resilience, as a normal part of portfolio construction. On generational differences, he noted that most inherited wealth today still passes to people in their 50s and 60s rather than 20- and 30-somethings, and that younger clients often become more pragmatic about sustainability and performance as they age and take on family responsibilities. He expects AI to create a “digital twin” for private bankers, handling repetitive execution and administration while freeing advisors for higher-value conversations, and defended the value of a focused, mid-sized player, “large enough to matter, small enough to care”, even as consolidation continues across the sector (Van Lanschot Kempen has acquired roughly ten smaller wealth managers over the past decade). His boldest prediction for five years out: digital assets and traditional finance will have meaningfully converged, and AI-driven benchmarking will make clients switch providers faster than they do today.

Joint presentation – Olivier Bouteille & Matthieu Keip, Amundi Technology

Olivier Bouteille, Chief Client Officer, and Matthieu Keip, Chief AI and Digital Officer, both from Amundi Technology, warned that AI is moving from a nice-to-have to an existential visibility issue for wealth managers. They cited a survey showing roughly half of UK adults already use tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and described how the launch of a UK AI tax and advice tool caused several listed wealth managers’ share prices to drop sharply, with only the firm that responded quickly to communicate its own AI strategy recovering. More strikingly, when they asked several leading LLMs which private bank they would recommend for a €10 million portfolio, only two firms were consistently named, a signal, they argued, that some firms may simply not exist yet in the world of AI-driven recommendations. Their core advice was to avoid “AI lipstick” layered on legacy systems and instead pursue leadership-driven transformation, treating every business process as a product with clear goals and lifecycle management, while keeping the technical foundation, data quality, modular APIs and platform architecture, as the real basis for any AI deployment. Matthieu shared concrete examples from Amundi, including an AI agent that checks marketing materials against fund documentation and compliance rules in real time, and a system of AI agents monitoring markets and portfolios continuously to proactively flag only genuinely relevant risks to portfolio managers, now live with over 300 portfolio managers. Both stressed a deliberate model-agnostic strategy, running open models such as Mistral and DeepSeek alongside proprietary ones to avoid over-dependence on any single AI provider, and argued that LLMs should generate language and next-step reasoning, never financial calculations or decisions, which must remain in auditable, deterministic systems.

Interview – Anonymous

Introduced initially as an Anonymous guest speaker, a private high-net-worth entrepreneur who built and sold several recruitment and executive search businesses, shared a candid client’s-eye view of wealth management. He described a hybrid approach: doing his own thematic research (such as identifying data center investment categories) before asking his bank to prepare detailed reports, then deciding and executing himself, while using Claude over ChatGPT for portfolio pushback and document analysis. He was open about a behavioral investing mistake around the timing of gold and silver purchases, described a very high risk tolerance including a substantial crypto allocation, and explained that his approach to wealth is shaped by wanting to give his two young children both freedom and a sense of independence, while preserving their drive to build their own careers. Asked about the best relationship he has had with a wealth manager, he pointed to a Swiss banker who is refreshingly direct and occasionally tells him he’s being too aggressive, valuing that honesty over flattery. His clearest ask for the industry was a genuinely holistic, real-time digital overview of his wealth across currencies and accounts, something he currently manages largely himself in a spreadsheet.

But …

Interview – Anneka Treon

Anneka Treon, Global Head of Private Banking, Wealth Management and Investments, ING, argued that clients now live holistic lives thanks to tools like ChatGPT, asking one assistant about diet, relationships and investments alike, while the wealth industry remains artificially siloed. She shared that her ten-year-old son recently built his own investment portfolio using ChatGPT, and argued the industry has been complacent for years, benefiting from client inertia rather than earning loyalty through genuine innovation. She compared a good advisor to a personal trainer, providing emotional discipline and coaching rather than just investment selection, and introduced the idea of “fast money” and “slow money,” arguing there is room in a client’s life for both speculative fun and long-term compounding, provided the industry offers both well. She pushed back directly on the idea that only wealthy clients deserve human advice, arguing that ING is deliberately investing in giving mass-market clients access to human conversations too, using data-driven, largely pre-filled financial plans and peer benchmarking to make those conversations easier to start. Her closing message was one of urgency and execution: ING has set a target to double assets under management within five years and grew invested assets by over 20% last year by treating that ambition as something to simply get done.

Speech – Thijs Buitenhuis, Norbury Capital

Thijs Buitenhuis, founder of Norbury Capital, a small, newly founded public equities asset manager, argued that AI is lowering the barrier to starting focused investment firms, since a founder today needs far fewer analysts to prepare research and portfolio decisions than even a few years ago. He described a broader trend of shortening investment horizons and markets increasingly being treated like games by younger investors, and made a personal case for the continued importance of public equity markets for Europe’s competitiveness. He shared an unconventional use of AI, tracking his own stress and emotional data via a wearable ring and correlating it with his investment decisions to counter behavioral biases, and argued that in a world of abundant AI-generated information, the real edge is increasingly the discipline to ignore commoditized information and focus research time on what genuinely differentiates a view, partly by using AI to meet with far more company management teams than before.

Speech – Yorick Naeff

Yorick Naeff, Chief Innovation [Officer], ABN AMRO, and co-founder of the neobroker Bux, argued that agentic AI will fundamentally reshape the relationship between banks and clients. He noted that today around 90% of real agentic AI use cases are in software development, with roughly 4% of the world’s code already AI-generated, but predicted this will broaden significantly as ecosystems mature. His central warning was that family offices are already interacting with banks through AI agents, and that as this spreads to retail and institutional clients, agents optimizing purely for the best return, lowest fee or most favorable tax outcome could make client loyalty far more fragile than banks are used to. He outlined four priorities for banks: performance, since agents will relentlessly act on the exact instructions and incentives they’re given, data quality, since poor data will directly degrade agent decisions, connectivity, since banks without APIs and integrations simply won’t be discoverable or reachable by agents, and pricing transparency. He argued a human should remain in the loop for the foreseeable future, drawing a comparison to self-driving cars, which are statistically safer than human drivers yet still face resistance in Europe due to unresolved liability and trust questions, and described ABN AMRO’s dual approach of shipping concrete AI use cases today (34 already in production) alongside a separate team reimagining core processes like mortgage applications entirely from scratch with AI at the center.

Speech – Jessica Rog

Jessica Rog, Head of Segment Value Propositions for Private Banking and Wealth Management, Rabobank, focused on winning three underserved groups: mass affluent clients, women (who hold 38% of invested assets in Europe, a segment she argued the industry still under-serves), and the next generation. She described Gen Z as fast-switching and far less loyal than their parents, pointing to products like Klarna and Revolut (whose appealing card design and packaging she admitted personally drew her in) as proof that experience and speed of innovation matter as much as substance. She highlighted purpose-driven investing as a generational marker, sharing an example of a young investor who deliberately avoided fossil fuel investments for values-based reasons even when it meant missing strong recent performance, arguing the industry needs to support many different definitions of “winning,” not just the highest return. She cited Robinhood’s new lifestyle-driven premium membership as an example of a private-banking-like experience delivered without the traditional infrastructure, and predicted that within the next decade, many financial conversations may happen directly between a client’s AI assistant and a bank’s AI system, rather than through an app or a human intermediary. She closed by challenging the room to consider what long-standing habits and assumptions the sector needs to let go of to remain relevant to this generation.

Closing wrap-up – Boudewijn Chalmers

Returning to close the morning, Boudewijn Chalmers reiterated that the pace of change is real, but cautioned that AI cannot fix an organization’s foundational technology and data problems, since poor underlying data will simply produce poor AI outcomes. He reaffirmed that shifting generational needs and new products will continue to reshape the industry, but offered reassurance that human expertise remains, and will remain, essential.

Lunch & Networking

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