By Dave Sikora
For decades, wealth management and investments has been governed by a simple strategy: chase the largest accounts that generate the highest fees. The top-down model, focused almost exclusively on high-net-worth clients and members, has delivered consistent margins and predictable revenues.
But the strategy that dominated the past 30 years is headed for strategic obsolescence and represents a massive new opportunity for credit unions. Wealth management and investments for credit unions has historically been an outsourced business to companies such as LPL, Raymond James and others. Critically, only an extremely small percentage of CU members take advantage of this because a) they manage investments elsewhere, or b) only 1% of all members have enough assets to be of interest to the outsourced company.
Even those members taking advantage of the outsourced relationship suffer through extremely cumbersome, non-integrated user experiences as well as very high transaction fees.
The Typical Discussion
Typically, wealth management strategic issues for credit unions revolve around questions like this:
- “What should we do with this business, it’s barely break-even?”
- “Should we even be in this business to only serve a small percentage of our members?”
- “Why are we sending our wealthiest members to another company for this service.”
- “Our members who use this service complain about having to log into different web sites and use a completely different mobile application.”
- “We don’t have the infrastructure to support a product offering that serves ALL of our members, so let’s move on.”
Four Structural Forces
Four structural forces are converging that the traditional model for wealth management and investments is fundamentally unequipped to address, creating a massive opportunity for credit unions to democratize access to capital markets:
The four forces are:
- The rise of early-life investing infrastructure triggered by “Trump Accounts.”
- The coming Great Wealth Transfer of historic scale
- The technological advances of AI supported advising solutions and zero-transaction fee products for self-directed and “ROBO” technologies.
- White-label software platforms that support fully integrated, “branded” investment centers for almost any size credit union.
Wealth management firms that cannot profitably serve customers/members at every stage of life risk becoming irrelevant. Credit unions may have a competitive advantage because their current product lines are highly complementary, arguably a requirement, to satisfy the needs created by these macro trends.
The Trump Accounts Effect: A Generational On-Ramp to Investing
Though still early, the roll-out of Trump Accounts — federally supported, tax-advantaged investment accounts seeded at birth — is already generating real engagement. More than one-million families have signed up during the initial phase of the 2026 tax season, even before the full online portal and regulatory guidance launch.
If projections hold, proponents estimate that Trump Accounts could put as much as $3 trillion to $4 trillion of wealth into the hands of young Americans over the next 10–15 years.
This isn’t theoretical. These are future investors — people who will be opening their first brokerage accounts, buying homes, borrowing for cars, and building deposit relationships decades before they become the typical target of legacy wealth firms or even credit unions for that matter. Parents of these future investors are precisely the demographic that credit unions need to attract, many of whom are already opening accounts at digital, modern financial institutions because their CU doesn’t have a solution for them.
Ignore at Your Peril
Yet the traditional wealth model largely ignores this cohort because — by historical standards — they lack sufficient assets to justify advisory attention. Currently, almost every credit union is ill-equipped to accommodate the Trump accounts, and the parents of these newborns are not even likely to consider a credit union as a potential destination for these accounts.
This demographic is also those who are moving to modern Fintechs that offer all products, such as Robinhood, SoFi and others. Imagine offering a $25 incremental Trump account contribution for every mortgage payment or car loan payment made for these customers? Or how about, “Place your child’s Trump Account with XYZ Credit Union and we’ll top it off with $500 and an extra 1% off your next mortgage.” The marketing possibilities are endless!
Since wealth management firms do not offer lending, they are vulnerable to this marketing approach. And because a significant majority of credit unions cannot currently support brokerage services, their members will be looking elsewhere to open these accounts.
The Great Wealth Transfer: A Historic Shift in Capital
Meanwhile, an unprecedented flow of assets is already underway. According to leading industry estimates, an estimated $124 trillion will change hands from older generations to heirs and charities in the U.S. by 2048. Of that total, $100 trillion is expected to transfer directly to heirs.
Millennials alone are projected to inherit roughly $46 trillion over the next 25 years — the largest share of any generation.
This transfer is not a distant event. With roughly $1.5–$2 trillion moving between generations every year, it is already reshaping investment behavior, family dynamics, and advisor relationships.
The Kicker
Here’s the kicker: legacy advisory models focus on current wealth — not wealth in motion. When tens of trillions are moving from one generation to the next, the institution that already holds the personal relationship before the transfer will almost certainly keep it after. Said another way: The recipient of this newfound wealth likely doesn’t relate to the backslapping, golf-playing investment manager used by their parents. Many members of credit unions are living month-month and dutifully paying their mortgages and car loans.
These same individuals and families could very well be starting small investment accounts at digital fintechs such as Robinhood, Sofi and others. However, they will also be overnight multi-millionaires when their Baby Boomer parents pass away – where will they go when this event happens? How prepared are credit unions for these events?
The Rise of AI-Influenced Advising Solutions
Developing detailed financial plans and asset allocation models is a critical part of wealth management, historically conducted by one-one human relationships. This process will usually take into consideration multiple unique life stage dimensions as part of a financial investment plan: Age, Income, Expenses, Family Size and Stage, Life Goals, and many other potential individual characteristics.
With the accelerated advance of AI technologies, humans are becoming less relevant in the development of financial plans for individuals. At a minimum, these technologies are raising the lower bar for a traditional wealth advisor: whereas historically it “paid” for a wealth advisor to embrace $1 million or several million in investable assets, AI solutions can provide the same advice for ZERO fees for larger and larger investable asset sizes.
Because these solutions are digital, they can also be provided “at-scale” with zero transaction fees for any amount of investable assets, even $100 or the purchase of fractional shares. This AI revolution represents an enormous vulnerability for traditional wealth management businesses and a reciprocal enormous opportunity for credit unions that can provide this support.
Branded Investment Centers: Infrastructure Is the Strategic Differentiator
The reason most credit unions historically could not pursue this strategy was not lack of ambition — it was lack of infrastructure. Building brokerage and investment services from scratch is expensive, complex, and compliance heavy.
That constraint no longer exists.
Just like white-label online and mobile banking platforms (OMB) such as Q2, Alkami, Fiserv, Jack Henry and others became mandatory for all financial institutions, the same is likely to happen for Investments. Emerging white-label platforms enable credit unions to embed investing directly into their digital ecosystem under their own brand.
This means:
- Serving smaller accounts profitably
- Capturing early wealth behavior
- Implementing new cross-sell and upsell opportunities
- Retaining the entire financial relationship
- Building a pipeline of future high-net-worth clients
This is not incremental product innovation — it is strategic redefinition.
Why Top-Down Fails and Bottom-Up Wins
The top-down strategy is structurally constrained due to:
- High minimums that screen out early investors
- Human-capital reliance that can’t scale economically
- Fee dependence on large balances that ignore future value
It’s not just outdated — it’s internally inconsistent with the future of capital markets participation. A bottom-up approach flips the playbook. Credit unions can:
- Onboard emerging investors early
- Capture lifetime value across deposits, loans, AND investments
- Retain fund flows as wealth transitions across generations
- Convert scale into profitability via digital, scalable infrastructure
For credit unions, this is an existential opportunity. None of the major wealth providers today can pivot quickly enough because they are locked into legacy cost structures and client segmentation logic that only work at the top. Not to mention they don’t have the breadth of products that can be leveraged for cross-selling and up-selling.
The Strategic Imperative & a Question
Wealth management’s future will be neither exclusively top-down nor purely digital. It will be hybrid —bottom-up access + top-tier advisory services.
But institutions that fail to embrace the bottom-upside of that axis will lose an entire generation — and the multitrillion-dollar economic shift riding right behind it.
The question is no longer whether democratizing access to capital markets is good policy–it’s whether your institution can afford not to do it.
David Sikora is a six-time public and private company CEO in the software and fintech industries, and has served as the board chairman for the largest state-chartered credit union in Texas. He currently serves as a board director and advisor for multiple fintech and software companies and executives. He can be reached at [email protected].
