Trust and reputation now eclipse fees in advisor selection

A TransUnion survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers found that trust and reputation now matter more than fees in choosing a wealth manager. The respondents all had at least $20,000 in investable assets. InvestmentNews first reported the research.

Sixty-five percent of current investors ranked trust and reputation among their top considerations. Forty-nine percent named fees and pricing. Among prospective investors, 58% put trust at the top.

Transparency is the trust-builder. Investors named clear communication about fees and advice, and brand credibility, as the two leading factors shaping trustworthiness. Each drew 56%.

Fraud protection is a separate weight. Fifty-six percent of investors are moderately to extremely concerned about how fraud could affect their investments. A firm that hesitates to address it has a retention problem.

A firm that speaks concretely about account monitoring, identity protections, and custody arrangements is addressing a worry most competitors will not mention. The conversation costs little, and vendor documentation backs it up. It also reinforces the trust message: the same investors who want fee clarity worry about asset safety.

Joshua Turnbull, TransUnion's senior vice president of financial services, draws the implication: "Wealth managers have traditionally competed on performance, products and price. Investors are telling us that confidence and credibility matter as much as – and sometimes more than – traditional decision factors."

A Gallup study with Edward Jones, published earlier this month, adds a twist. Of the Americans who sought financial guidance in the past year, 32% turned to a professional advisor. The internet drew 73%. Yet when Gallup asked how much confidence each source deserves, advisors topped the list. 79% expressed at least some confidence. That was more than double the share for AI tools. Finance professors drew 64%. Relatives and family, 62%. Friends and colleagues, just over 50%.

The Gallup numbers point the same way. People research online, but they trust advisors more than any other source. Trust is not the scarce resource; a clear, transparent reason to hire a specific firm is. A practice that uses its website to say how it gets paid, what it costs, and where client assets are held is meeting clients where decisions take shape.

RIA principals should study the gap between confidence and usage. Advisors earn the most trust of any source, yet most guidance-seekers went online first. So the obstacle is not credibility but access, price, or simple friction. The independent channel can address all three in one move: a first conversation that covers what the firm costs, how it gets paid, and where the money sits before performance numbers come up.

Brand credibility drew 56%, which sounds like good news for household names. But the same share cited clear communication about fees and advice, and a small RIA controls that directly. A candid fee discussion and a plain-language client agreement can offset a brand disadvantage without a marketing budget.

Set the data beside the industry's pricing habits, and the fee-first pitch looks aimed at the wrong target. Price is easy to compare and easy to undercut, but clients rank transparency above savings. Fees matter, but they no longer decide. A pitch that leads with "we charge less" answers a question the client hasn't asked, and it quietly tells the client that price is the thing to watch.

One caveat about the sample: $20,000 in investable assets sits well below the typical RIA minimum, so the findings fit the mass-affluent market most cleanly. The direction still holds. The firm that answers the trust question first, in plain words and plain numbers, has the better pitch. A fee disclosed in three sentences, set beside a fiduciary commitment, does trust work. A fee slide buried under a performance deck does nothing.