The ‘Mass Affluent’ Are Losing Their Allure for Wealth Managers Navigating AI

Oh, marvellous. The one-percenters are now being told they're not quite rich enough to deserve a warm, flesh-and-blood human money-manager. According to McKinsey's latest consultancy-droid wisdom, wealth managers are realising that clients with a paltry $1 million — the so-called 'mass affluent' — can be fobbed off with AI-driven advice that's 'near-private-banking quality.' Near-quality. Absolutely smashing. So the message to anyone with a mere seven-figure portfolio is: sorry, chum, you're now entry-level for a glorified chatbot. Human attention is reserved for the 'actual' rich, presumably those who still have a butler to answer the door.

The delicious irony is that McKinsey itself has been evangelising AI's cost-cutting miracles for years, and now the industry has finally listened: why pay a human to butter up clients when an algorithm can do it for pennies? The report doesn't mention what happens when the AI recommends a few dud investments and the client loses their 'mass affluent' status — but I'm sure there's a chatbot for complaints, too, probably trained on Kafka's 'The Trial.' The 'mass affluent' label was always a bit patronising, but being downgraded from semi-VIP to automated queue-bait is a new level of financial snobbery.

And let's not pretend this is about efficiency. This is about the relentless pursuit of margins, where the definition of 'worth human attention' keeps inching upward. First it was retail investors, then the merely affluent, and now the million-dollar club. But hey, at least the AI will never judge you for having a manager with halitosis. Small mercies, eh?