AI, ESG & the Future of Wealth: Andy Sieg on Citi’s Strategy | Milken 2025

Hey, it's so great to be here, Josh. Thank you.

Generational change is something we've been talking about in wealth management for my whole career, which started 33 years ago. This is a more profound set of changes happening right now than what we've seen in the prior three decades. The first reason I say that is there's not only more money that's moving, there's more money actually moving to families which are smaller today than families in the past. So when you think about this dynamic, those who are on the receiving end, these are much larger balances. The stakes are much higher in terms of their ability to get their arms around the core of how their wealth is managed. The world's more complex. Tax policy considerations for many of our clients are at the top of the list. And then the mindset difference. What you touched on is a very deep change. When we think about the World War II generation, if you asked members of that generation how they factor in their views of the broader world and their values into the way they set their investment portfolio, they would look at you like you asked a question about the man on the moon. This had no relationship whatsoever to how they think about their portfolio. Fast forward to today, to the generation receiving these inheritances, they look at you like, well, that's the most obvious question anybody could ask. How do you even think that's news? Of course I bring my broader set of values and concerns to my investment portfolio, and I think about it in many ways the way I live my life as a consumer in lots of other categories where I want to buy something great, but I also want to make sure it says something about me, it speaks to me in a deeper way.

Such a great question. I know we got a lot of viewers of Worth programming who are in the business. This is a conversation which is dominating boardrooms and management teams and local offices around the country because everybody has heard the same statistic: when a client passes, money's up for grabs, and in many cases you see a substantial amount of dollars moving out to a new provider. There's a lot of dynamics that drive that, sometimes it's differences among a couple, sometimes it's generational changes. This also is a theme that you receive and hear very differently depending on whether you are an incumbent or you're a new entrant or even an insurgent in the marketplace. At Citi, our roots in wealth management go back a hundred years, but in many ways in the US we're an insurgent. We're alongside some of the RIAs and others who are trying to grow share very dramatically. So what to some is threat, to us equals opportunity right now. There's going to be an opportunity to start a dialogue with scores of clients who we think we can show the Citi brand and Citi's capabilities to in fresh ways. So here at Milken, why we've partnered with Milken is really that intersection of business, finance, impact. They talk a lot about philanthropy, they talk a lot about the positive impact that successful people can make on the world. I think we see that the millennial generation does care about profits and purpose, they go hand in hand. But they don't want to trade off, they don't want to take less return, but they do care about purpose. So things like ESG tend to come up in a lot of our conversations.

Well, as I said, you almost can't have a conversation about portfolio management without in a very square way talking about impact, talking about ESG topics, talking about broader values. In some ways, of course, when you say ESG it today takes on a political tone, but we have as many conversations with people who are thinking about how to build a Christian values portfolio as those who are thinking about how their environmental leanings come into the way money's managed. So I don't think this is a topic of right or left. I think this is a topic of what is modern look like in terms of the dialogue clients want to have. And a number of the things you touched on speak to what is real innovation in wealth management. To me, it's about continuing relevance to clients. Do you have something compelling to say that your clients are going to stop and listen to? And that conversation today can no longer be, let's help you cut your asset allocation pie chart in the right three, four, five slices. It's how do we connect dots between dollars and other facets of your life. The impact discussion you said is certainly one manifestation of this, but wealth and health, wealth in your business, what your wealth means to your kids and the way they're thinking about their lives and their values, and the work ethic that they're developing. Is that going to benefit from the fact that you were successful, or is your success going to one day be something you look at as detrimental to your kids' development? So I think in our business we need to understand that our clients are not bags of money, they're people with multi-dimensional lives, and we serve the purpose best by helping them bring all of those facets of their life into focus.

Well, I'd say one other thing, and this may be speaking to some of the wealth managers again that follow your programming. If it's a topic that you're hesitant to broach with clients, I would urge you to do so. It's the right thing to do, it's also a commercially important thing to do because these conversations around ESG and impact and philanthropy get you to a much deeper knowledge of clients more rapidly than almost any conversation you can have. And one of the things that's very striking in our business is how many 20, 30-year relationships with clients have existed purely on the level of market investment returns, maybe tax implications, but we don't know as much as we should about what makes our clients really tick. It's one of the reasons that the back door can be open when generational change happens. This can take you much deeper in your relationship with clients much more rapidly.

Well, the first thing I think about is AI has given a lot of industry observers, columnists, and others reason to write the same story they've been writing for 30 years, which is technology is going to put a financial adviser out of business. That is not going to happen. While AI isn't going to displace advisers, I think advisers that use AI will displace advisers that don't. So the impact of AI is going to be profound. It will start by bringing more efficiency to many of the things we're doing every day in the front office of our businesses as well as the middle and the back. Tedious topics like how do you generate call reports and meeting summaries, everybody is way down the road already of bringing AI to bear. What I'm most excited about is something that I think again is not far off, but we're probably two or three years to see a much more profound impact AI can have in the way we're delivering advice. By that, I'm thinking of how can we scale what a great advisor delivers to a handful of clients across 20 or 30 hundred client relationships on a daily proactive basis. How can you be generating a market update at the end of every day that can go out in an automated way to a client tuned for what they actually own in their portfolio or what you know about their personal interests? This would have been impossible to think about a year ago at scale, and it will be impossible to not have in your business model two years from now.

Well, we're in a time where wealth creation is happening at a level that we've never seen in the US and around the world. I think despite so many political and geopolitical forces that are making people think about fragmentation, people are still going to operate globally. They're going to have global dreams, they're going to run global businesses, they're going to have family members that are living around the world. If you see this from the seat that I have, as part of Jane Fraser's team at the world's most global bank, one of the things that excites me is how the global network of Citi can help us compete for and serve growing wealth around the world like nobody else. So that's very exciting, and I think in many ways these legacy strengths of Citi are going to come to the fore in terms of how we play and win the game in wealth management.