Aneri Jambusaria speaks with the calm confidence of someone who has rewired her own approach to work. Early in her career, a 360-degree review revealed a blind spot: she held too tightly to projects she knew she could ace—“a sure thing”—instead of delegating or chasing higher-stakes opportunities. But avoiding failure also meant avoiding growth, she says.
That realization sparked what Jambusaria calls a shift from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance, a recalibration she now applies as head of LPL Financial’s wealth-management business. She delegates more, trusts her team to pursue stretch projects, and takes bigger swings—nudged by a partner who encouraged her to seize opportunities she might have once declined.
That expanded risk appetite has placed her at the center of a wealth-management boom. “The demand for advice has never been stronger,” she says, citing a gap between surging investor interest and the supply of skilled advisors. Financial planning is no longer reserved for the ultra-rich, Jambusaria says. In fact, the democratization of retirement savings has created millions of new clients, and LPL aims to meet them.
Jambusaria has spent her career in wealth management, most recently at Fidelity Investments. While building out Fidelity’s wealth-management offerings, she took the nontraditional step of earning a certified financial planner credential despite not being client-facing, gaining what she calls “a great knowledge set around what great advice looks like” and the authority to lead as a practitioner.
Now, she’s channeling that discipline into LPL’s growth playbook, where she’s driving deeper advisor adoption of the firm’s in-house tools and products and making client and advisor relationships “as sticky as possible” by embedding a full suite of services into every portfolio. Success is measured in new assets, stronger retention, and the breadth of products each advisor uses.
Jambusaria sees multiple generations transforming the very definition of a high-net-worth client. There are simply more “millionaires next door,” she says—a fast-growing band with $5 to $30 million in investable assets and a swelling ultra-wealthy cohort above that. These clients seek seamless digital engagement, integrated banking and lending, and portfolios that move beyond the classic 60/40 equity-bond split toward a more balanced approach, with approximately 30% in equities, 40% in bonds, and 30% in alternative assets.
The biggest shift, she says, is a “two-stage transfer” of wealth. First, wealth often passes to a surviving spouse (in many cases, an older woman) before it ever reaches children or grandchildren. That alone is reshaping advisor relationships. Women inheritors frequently have different priorities, from philanthropy to legacy planning, and many were never the primary contact for the family advisor.
“You’d better make sure you have a relationship with the surviving spouse,” she warns, because too many firms still treat that connection as secondary. Advisors who fail to establish relationships with all key decision-makers risk losing the account.
The second transfer, from those spouses to Millennials and Gen Z, will unfold over the next decade or two, she says, and it will demand a new playbook. Younger inheritors want digital access and hyper-personalization. They expect their investments to reflect personal values and social preferences, from ESG considerations to private ventures and alternative assets. They also bring an entrepreneurial streak, especially those emerging from the booming tech and AI sectors, where sudden wealth from stock options and early-stage investments is creating a younger class of well-heeled clients.
LPL already sees advisors specializing in these clients’ unique needs, from complex equity compensation to private-market opportunities.
These trends converge with Jambusaria’s push to embed artificial intelligence into advisory work. She expects AI to boost advisor productivity by 50% or more, automating routine tasks like note-taking and portfolio rebalancing so human advisors can focus on orchestration and trust.
She has already utilized ChatGPT as a “sidekick” during her continuing education for the Certified Financial Planner designation, calling it “an excellent financial planner academically.”
Yet she is adamant that the human element remains indispensable in wealth management.
“It’s your life savings,” she says. “At the end of the day, you’re going to want to look someone in the eye.”
