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If you manage assets for women clients, there’s a number worth sitting with: 65.8% of women with financial advisors say they don’t always know what questions to ask in their own meetings.
Not because they lack the assets. Not because they lack the education. The women behind this statistic, surveyed by totumai, Inc. as part of a 300-person research study, are largely established investors — 76% already have an advisor, 35% hold $500,000 or more in investable assets, and 80% hold a college or graduate degree. They are not new to investing. They are simply not being given a clear way into the conversation.
A familiar pattern, hiding in plain sight
Every advisor has sat across from a client who seems engaged, nods through the meeting, and leaves with no follow-up questions — only to realize weeks later, through an email or a missed referral, that she never actually understood the recommendation. totumai’s research suggests this is not a rare occurrence. Nearly half of women with an advisor — 46.5% — say they actively hesitate to ask questions for fear of revealing a lack of knowledge. And 78.5% wish their advisor’s documents were simply easier to understand.
This is what researchers call a communication architecture problem, not a confidence problem intrinsic to the client. McKinsey’s 2025 research on women and wealth management found the industry has only marginally adapted to the distinct communication preferences of female investors — even as women approach control of $34 trillion in U.S. assets by 2030, up from roughly $18 trillion today.
The cost of the unanswered question
The stakes for advisors are significant and measurable. Women make 26 referrals over a lifetime on average, more than double the 11 made by men, and tend to stay loyal once trust is established — Capital Group’s 2025 research found women are 10 percentage points more likely than men to remain with their advisor through retirement. Referrals and retention are the two engines that grow a practice over decades. Both run on trust, and trust is built in the moments when a client feels safe enough to ask a real question.
What's filling the gap right now
Clients aren’t waiting for the industry to solve this. Many are already turning to AI to prepare for meetings with their advisor, rehearsing the conversation they wish felt safe to have without preparation. That’s a quiet but important signal: the demand for a better way into the conversation already exists. The only question is who meets it.
angela by totumai was designed to meet it directly. angela gives clients a secure, private workspace where they can upload their investment statements, policy documents, and shareholder reports and work through them with angela line by line — asking what a term means, why a holding changed, or what a fee actually covers. Nothing uploaded is stored or shared, and none of it touches a public LLM. Outside of document review, angela also helps clients translate financial jargon on the fly and organize their thinking before a meeting, so they walk in with the questions they actually want answered — without angela ever offering financial advice itself. Every prepared question is a more productive meeting, and every more productive meeting is a stronger relationship.
For advisors, the opportunity isn’t just better client experience. It’s a structural advantage in how practices compound trust, referrals, and retention over the coming decade — especially as the largest wealth transfer in history reshapes who controls assets in this country.
Read the full research: totumai’s 2026 whitepaper, “She Controls $18 Trillion. Why Doesn’t She Feel Confident About Her Finances?” unpacks the data and what it means for your practice. [Read the full report at totumai.net →]
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