If you have spent any time in the wealth management industry in the last decade, you have heard the number. Seventy percent of heirs leave their parents' advisor. It anchors slide decks, conference keynotes, and product marketing across the sector. It is also a shorthand — one that compresses a body of research into a single line that is nearly always cited without context.
The original source is a Cerulli Associates research programme that has been refined across several published reports. In the most recent 2025 Cerulli release covered by CNBC, the picture is sharper and more specific than the 70 percent line suggests. Only 14 percent of heirs retain their parents' advisor after an inheritance event. Of the rest, 50 percent already have their own advisor — a relationship built independently of their parents. Another 28 percent report no existing relationship with their parents' advisor whatsoever. That last number is the one every firm should be sitting with.
What the research really says
Read carefully, the Cerulli data is not describing a marketing problem or a service quality gap. It is describing a relationship gap. Heirs leave because the relationship was never built in the first place. The firms keeping heirs on platform are the ones that introduced themselves, systematically, years before inheritance became a present-tense question.
Heirs are not leaving — they are simply choosing the relationship they already have over the relationship they never had.
This reframing matters because it changes what a wealth management firm should build. If the issue were service quality, the response would be better client experience. If the issue were returns, the response would be sharper portfolio management. But if the issue is relationship construction — not whether relationships are good, but whether they exist — the response is infrastructure that systematises heir engagement across an entire firm.
What firms should do with this
The firms quietly winning this decade are the ones treating the Cerulli data as an operational directive. Three patterns recur across the firms that are doing this well:
- They audit the heir relationship on every household at the point of onboarding, not at the point of transition.
- They assign formal responsibility for heir engagement to the primary advisor, with a structured cadence of touch points.
- They track heir engagement as a leading indicator of household retention, separate from primary client satisfaction.
None of these practices are new. The best firms have always done them — quietly, inconsistently, and with varying degrees of rigour depending on which advisor you ask. What is new is the recognition that doing them at scale requires infrastructure, not just intent.
Why Heritance exists
Heritance is the infrastructure layer for firms that have read the Cerulli data and decided to build around it. Our view is that the 70 percent number is not a fate — it is a consequence of missing systems. Every firm already knows it should be engaging heirs earlier. What they have lacked is a platform that lets them do it at the scale of their book. That is what we build.
The research is unambiguous. What the industry does with it — firm by firm, advisor by advisor — is the story of the next decade.
