Today is International Women's Day. A large percentage of women surveyed recently say the private banking/wealth management sector does not sufficiently grasp their needs, suggesting a major opportunity is being lost.

More than two-thirds of female investors surveyed by EY, the global professional services firm, say their private banker or wealth manager does not understand their goals, a finding that might go some way to explaining why businesses fall short in increasing their share of wallet.

The findings come ahead of International Women’s Day, on 8 March.

The EY report, entitled Women and Wealth: The Case For A Customized Approach, comes at a time when UBS, the world’s largest wealth manager, this week announced a new branding campaign with a focus on women. A report by that bank in 2015, produced in association with PricewaterhouseCoopers, showed that the world’s female billionaire population, for example, has risen at a faster pace than for men. And yet the share of wallet in some wealth management markets, among men and women, can be difficult to shift. In the UK, for example, Scorpio Partnership, the consultancy, has estimated that this share is stuck around the 40 per cent mark. 

Some 67 per cent of female investors globally felt their wealth manager or private banker misunderstood their goals, the EY report found. EY conducted a survey of approximately 800 women. It also supplemented that with referencing work done from Roubini ThoughtWorks which totaled nearly 500 women investors.

“This power, and the relative complexity of their financial lives, means that women represent a huge opportunity for the wealth management industry. Yet most wealth managers view gender segmentation as being of minor importance. It is hardly surprising that many female investors feel unwelcomed and even alienated by the investment industry,” EY said in its report.

The report also found that fulfilling personal goals was identified as the “most important investment priority” by wealthy women (40 per cent), significantly ahead of beating market performance (31 per cent). By contrast, this market-beating outcome is the key investment objective for male investors, according to EY.

That focus on meeting personal goals was even higher when broken down by certain regions and markets. The percentage saying this is important is up at 86 per cent in Hong Kong, 80 per cent in Singapore and 74 per cent in mainland China.

But the message is not getting through to wealth managers, according to the report, which found that most wealth managers globally viewed gender as the least important source of client differentiation (only 5 per cent viewed gender as a key driver of segmentation). 

The failure to get the point about women’s perspectives is all the more striking because EY found that wealthy women are significantly more likely to switch between wealth providers than men (62 per cent compared to 44 per cent).

Asian participation
In a separate but related report, UBS yesterday launched a new white paper called Gender-Lens Wealth. Based on the findings, Singapore ranks first in Asia-Pacific with the highest level of women’s economic participation and opportunity in the world. Singapore also ranks first in Asia-Pacific in terms of maternity leave provisions. The paper said the three key focuses for gender-lens wealth are: reducing women's unpaid domestic work burdens, including childcare; boosting maternity provisions, and improving women's STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education outcomes.

The findings compared major emerging APAC economies' performance in those areas (defined throughout as China, South Korea, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines) relative to major developed APAC economies (Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong).