No mean feat by any standard. In contrast to the baby-boomers that preceded them, millennials are faced with an economic and market environment fully exposed to the forces of globalization and by the threat of recessions. Losses of wealth suffered early on in your career are much harder to recover from. In a recent study, Swiss bank Credit Suisse labelled the millennials a generation of the unlucky.

«Highly-paid private bankers for the ultra-rich don't hold trump cards»

This is far away from wellness. And therefore the new service has to be even more far-reaching to make a happy retirement achievable for the young. Experts say that the entire life has to be revamped: which education is the most promising, who to work for, where to live, if and when to start a family. And most importantly: how to structure the years still ahead. And that is something fairly positive, because the millennials are likely to be much more mobile in their later years than today’s elderly due to their current fitness level.

The banks, including the aforementioned UBS, are primed to launch. Switzerland’s biggest bank in wealth management prefers to hire financial planners who are able to advise their clients during entire stages of their lives.

Therefore, the demands on relationship managers are increasingly rapidly. The question is if the private bankers are going to make it even including an additional set of know-how. The highly-paid specialists for the rich aren’t the ones with the trump cards for financial wellness banking.

«Insurers further at analyzing wellness»

Instead, it may be that the time has come for insurers to shine. They have a long history of advising clients for longer periods of their lives in their pension provision, health care and life insurance divisions. At the heart of their advice may have been worries about losing money than about financial wellness. But the ground is familiar for insurers. Also, the industry has close ties with the corporate sector thanks to the professional pension plans. Companies are the crucial factor for achieving financial wellness.

The first companies have already started making use of this advantage in Switzerland. Swiss Life, the biggest life insurer, has linked pension provision with wealth management. It also included pension planning, health care services and safe living for the elderly. Swiss Life has come close to financial wellness with this compilation of services.

The only problem is that the service is aimed at retired clients only.


Samuel Gerber is a writer and editor at finews.ch. He was in charge of the finance pages at Switzerland's «Handelszeitung» and also worked for Axel Springer Switzerland and at a number of regional newspapers. He studied business journalism at the ZHAW university in Winterthur as well as languages at the University of Bern. 


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