Trust now outranks fees when investors pick an advisor

Advisors hold the highest trust of any financial source Gallup measured in research conducted with Edward Jones, with 79% of Americans expressing at least some confidence in their expertise — more than double the share who say the same of AI tools. Yet only 32% of guidance-seekers actually used an advisor in the past year while 73% leaned on their own internet research, and new TransUnion research helps explain the gap: when investors choose an advisor, trust and reputation now outrank fees and pricing.

InvestmentNews reported the survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers with at least $20,000 in investable assets, in which 65% of current investors put trust and reputation in their top selection factors against 49% for fees and pricing, while 58% of prospective investors named trust and reputation first.

What earns that trust is transparency. Investors point to clear communication about fees and advice, and to brand credibility, as the two leading trust builders — each cited by 56% of respondents — while 56% say they are moderately to extremely concerned about how fraud could affect their investments. The direction is plain: explain what you do, what it costs, and how the money is protected.

“Wealth managers have traditionally competed on performance, products and price,” said Joshua Turnbull, senior vice president of financial services at TransUnion. “Investors are telling us that confidence and credibility matter as much as – and sometimes more than – traditional decision factors.”

Gallup’s wider work backs him up: advisors outrank finance professors (64% confidence), relatives (62%), and friends or colleagues (just over 50%), so the usage gap is not a trust gap but a discovery gap. Investors will pay for guidance they trust; they just find it late.

For RIAs, the read is that fee compression tracks opaque pricing. The 56% who cite clear fee communication outnumber the 49% who cite fees themselves as a selection factor, so a firm that states its price in one sentence, explains what the fee covers and ties it to fraud protection converts a cost conversation into a confidence conversation. As this publication has argued, AI’s first wealth application is the client meeting, and the survey shows why — no tool is better at turning a portfolio into a plain-language explanation.

The annual review has to change with this, because a performance report is no longer the core artifact: the trust report is, showing the client the fences — custody details, account protection, the rationale for each holding. With 56% of investors carrying fraud concerns, security infrastructure is client-facing, and the RIA that documents its process is the RIA that never has to discount its price.

TransUnion’s numbers say the reason to believe must be explicit, repeated and embedded in the client experience, and the firm that treats transparency as a product wins the next fee war before it starts.