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It’s widely known that many advisors to attract high- and ultra-high-net-worth clients. Simple math confirms why prospects that are millionaires and beyond are highly desirable to wealth managers.
On a fee-based model, converting a good number of prospects that have $1 million or more in assets to clients means an advisor is cooking with gas. Gaining that business, particularly in volume, is an efficient way of orchestrating top-line growth and setting up a practice for long-term success. Of course, there are a limited number of prospects that are credibly wealthy, let alone millionaires.
Advisors shouldn’t be frustrated that fact. Actually, there should be optimism when it comes to landing more wealthy clients because the 2025 Global Wealth Report by UBS indicates the U.S. added 379,000 millionaires last year, or more than 1,000 per day.
Depending on the data source, the percentage of Americans, millionaires and otherwise, working with advisors, is 27% to 35%. So call it 31% and that means a lot of millionaires, including the newly minted ones, aren’t yet working with fiduciaries. That implies advisors don’t necessarily as daunting of a task as previously thought when it comes to getting a millionaire, two or several in the door.
Advisors, Meet EMILLI
Many advisors and clients alike are likely familiar with Thomas Stanley’s book, originally published in 1996, The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy. One of the book’s prominent points is that there are a lot of wealthy people out there, but the rest of the world doesn’t know it because they don’t act or look “rich.” UBS has a spin on that theme known as “EMILLI” or everyday millionaires.
“As our analysis shows, the number of EMILLIs in the world has more than quadrupled since 2000 to around 52 million,” according to the asset manager. “At the end of 2024, EMILLIs accounted for around USD 107 trillion of total wealth. That’s more than four times the amount seen at the end of the year 2000, equivalent to over 2.5 times in real terms. It’s also close to the USD 119 trillion own.”
EMILLIs and millionaires next door aren’t exactly the same thing, but both are relevant cohorts to advisors with the former increasingly so.
As UBS point out, the number of global EMILLIs, led by the U.S., has surged 4x over the past 25 to the point that they controlled a staggering $107 trillion in wealth at the end of the last year. At the asset class level, much of EMILLI’s ascendance is attributable to usual suspects: rising equity prices and soaring values on residential real estate.
Implications for Female Clients
Smart advisors realize that the rising millionaire population isn’t limited to men. Women are participating in that trend and they figure prominently in the global great wealth transfer that could see $83 trillion in assets change hands over the next 20 to 25 years.
UBS points out that women are positioned to benefit from both intra- and inter-generational shifts in wealth. With $29 trillion of that $83 trillion expected to change hands in the U.S., advisors in this country need to be ready with customized planning and strategies.
“The findings reveal that 80% of women who inherited from parents faced challenges, such as not knowing the extent of their parents’ wealth or encountering financial surprises,” concludes UBS.