Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.
Ash Chopra’s client had a grueling experience waiting for his child to be seen in an emergency room, where it can sometimes take hours for patients to get help.
It was a humbling moment for the client, who was “an extremely wealthy man,” Chopra said.
The client came to Chopra after the fact. “He said, ‘I never want to have that experience ever again, Ash. How can we fix that?'”
For Chopra, the founder and CEO of registered investment advisor Syon Capital, which he launched in October upon leaving Merrill Private Wealth Management, such questions — seemingly irrelevant to a traditional financial advisor’s job of managing investments — are par for the course in his practice of serving ultrahigh net worth clients.
Read more: $4.5B Merrill team launches RIA as channel draws advisors and investors
The number of ultrahigh net worth families with a net worth over $30 million has been growing, with an estimated 101,240 of them in the United States as of 2021, and their lives are becoming more complex. And like Chopra’s client, they often turn to advisors for solutions in all areas.
Chopra spoke at an industry panel event Wednesday hosted by VettaFi on serving ultrahigh net worth clients in the RIA world, and described his experience offering bespoke services to those clients. He was joined by Kelly Maregni, the president of multifamily office and RIA Pathstone. Paul Ferguson, the managing director at Schwab Advisor Family Office, moderated. Syon and Pathstone are both clients of Schwab Advisor Services, an RIA-serving custody business at Charles Schwab that includes Ferguson’s unit.
“Clients come to us for more than just financial advice and guidance,” Chopra said on the panel, adding that the management of their wealth at this level often extends to “all-encompassing” support for “their culture, their education, their lifestyle.”
In the case above, Chopra decided to partner with a concierge medical service going forward so that clients could get instant personal medical support during a health emergency. In the case of one client, who Chopra was vacationing with in Hawaii, it came in handy as the man broke his neck on the beach, became paralyzed and nearly drowned — but fortunately was able to get quickly airlifted to Honolulu for emergency surgery “to put him back together.”
That’s the level of attention it takes to stay in the game with the richest clients now, the panelists said.
Read more: 5 takeaways from Arizent’s research on the great wealth transfer
Ferguson agreed, citing interviews he had conducted in the field where he found that successful multifamily offices are always “the first call for their clients. They are that trusted advisor, very first call for everything, financial and non-financial.”
For more insights from the panel on how to attract and keep the business of these elites, scroll down our cardshow.