Feature Articles The wealth opportunity within reach

For firms that already hold strong high-net-worth relationships, the question is less about whether the opportunity exists than how to position themselves to serve it. Getting that right means understanding three things the research brings into focus: how much of the wealthy market these firms already hold, how their clients' needs are shifting, and what it now takes to serve them at scale.

Hiding in plain sight

One of the clearest findings is how embedded many stockbroking firms already are in the high-net-worth market, often without knowing it. Among the firms surveyed, 79% already work with high-net-worth clients, 64% report that at least half their book is high net worth, and 79% manage portfolios above $6 million. That nearly a third of clients are wholesale (32%) confirms these are sophisticated rather than entry-level accounts. The relationships are long-standing, built over years on a foundation of investment expertise, market access and hard-won trust, and they tend to span decades, often generations. For most firms the opportunity is therefore one of depth rather than acquisition: becoming more valuable to the clients they already hold.

Client wealth has outgrown the portfolio

Clients now hold far more than shares. Australian equities remain the foundation, held by 95% of clients, but their portfolios have broadened. With 90% of firms servicing international equities, 88% using ETFs and 60% incorporating alternatives, portfolios are reaching well beyond listed markets. In practice, direct shares, superannuation, alternatives, managed investments and private assets increasingly sit side by side, across several structures and providers. Three-quarters of advisers with a high-net-worth focus report clients are holding assets outside their primary reporting environment, and when a meaningful share of a client's wealth sits beyond the adviser's line of sight, whole-of-wealth advice becomes difficult to provide with any confidence.

Greater complexity has not, however, reduced the appetite for control. Seventy-nine per cent of advisers say HIN ownership still matters to their clients, valued for direct ownership of securities, portability and transparency. In the Australian market that preference is well founded: a Holder Identification Number confers direct legal title via CHESS, rather than the beneficial interest of a custodial arrangement, which is precisely what the portability and transparency clients value depend upon. Demand now is for more help in managing arrangements that have grown harder to see as a whole, without surrendering the ownership clients prize.

A hybrid model, without the ideology

The industry has answered pragmatically rather than ideologically. Seventy per cent of stockbroking firms now describe themselves as advisory-led broking businesses, 82% earn advisory or wealth management fees, and managed account adoption has reached 49% overall, rising to 66% among advisers under 50. The fee figure is the telling one: with over 80% of firms already charging for advice or wealth management, this is commercial reality rather than aspiration. What is emerging is a hybrid model, in which broking and advice sit within a single relationship rather than standing as competing propositions — not broking giving way to advice, but the broker relationship widening to carry more of what clients want from it.

Through working extensively with brokers we’ve identified six capabilities that platforms need to effectively support the hybrid model: HIN and CHESS structures, direct trading and global access, managed accounts, consolidated reporting, digital client experiences and integrated advice infrastructure. These are all vital components of the model, which is why firms tend to adopt them together rather than adding them piecemeal.

Where the technology earns its keep

Technology is what makes the wider model workable. Advisers currently spend around 25% of the week in front of clients and 22% on compliance and administration. And going forward they expect the client-facing share to rise to 32% while administration falls to 15%. That gain will not come from working harder but from systems that connect a client experience presently scattered across separate tools. A platform able to carry direct equities, managed accounts, alternatives and externally held assets, report on them as a single position and feed cleanly into the advice process, turns each into a solved problem rather than another administrative task. For a firm, that reallocation is the difference between advice that scales and advice that stalls at the limits of the working day.

The platform makes the difference

The firms best placed for what comes next are not those that choose between broking and advice, but those that combine them in a single hybrid model, pairing the direct ownership and market access clients have always valued, with the broader and clearer view of wealth they now expect. Making that model work though, comes down to one decision above all else: the platform beneath it. A hybrid business can be only as capable as the technology it runs on, and the firms that pull ahead will be those that choose a platform able to deliver control, advice and scale together rather than forcing a trade-off between them. In a market where demand keeps outrunning capacity, that choice is what will separate the firms that turn the opportunity into growth, from those that simply hold their ground.

Download a copy of our eBook Wealth in Transition for more details on our research into the Australian stockbroking industry.

^{Source for all data quoted is the Praemium/SIAA/CoreData Stockbroking Industry Research released in May 2026 from a survey of 100 Australian stockbrokers}