The Wealth Manager's New Job Description

In a fully tokenised world, portfolio construction, custody, and client advisory all change. Not incrementally. Structurally. Here is what the role actually looks like on the other side.

Start with the role, not the product

Most of the tokenisation conversation in wealth management centres on what gets tokenised. A bond. A fund. A structured note. These are the visible outputs — the things you can put in a pitch deck.

The harder question: what happens to the wealth manager when the entire portfolio — every asset a client holds — exists on-chain? When settlement is instant, custody is programmable, reporting is real-time, and the barriers between asset classes dissolve?

Wealth managers do not disappear. But their role changes more than at any point since the shift from commission-based brokerage to fee-based advisory. The firms that see this early gain a structural edge. The firms that see it late pay for the lesson.

From gatekeeper to architect

Today, much of a wealth manager's value comes from access. Access to fund platforms, primary issuances, alternative managers with ticket sizes individual investors cannot meet. The wealth manager aggregates capital, negotiates terms, provides the operational machinery — custody, reporting, compliance.

Tokenisation erodes every one of those access advantages. Fractional ownership drops minimums from hundreds of thousands to hundreds. On-chain settlement removes layers of intermediary processing. Compliance embedded in token standards like ERC-3643 automates what used to require manual verification at every transfer. 24/7 secondary markets, when they mature, reduce the illiquidity premium that keeps many alternative assets inside institutional wrappers.

This does not eliminate the wealth manager's purpose. It shifts the source of it. From gatekeeper of access to architect of outcomes. From processor to portfolio designer.

J.P. Morgan's Project Guardian, conducted through its Kinexys platform with Apollo under Singapore's MAS, made this concrete. Their proof-of-concept showed a portfolio manager constructing, deploying, rebalancing, and updating discretionary portfolios across traditional and alternative assets on shared ledger infrastructure. The operational steps that currently require multiple systems, teams, and days of processing collapsed into smart contract execution. What remained — and became more valuable — was the portfolio design itself.

The wallet-native portfolio

Franklin Templeton's Sandy Kaul put the end-state plainly at the Ondo Summit in February 2026: every financial asset will eventually be represented in a digital wallet. Panellists from Fidelity, State Street, and WisdomTree agreed. The debate has moved from whether to when.

Consider what this does to the operating model. Today, a client's assets sit fragmented across custodians, fund administrators, insurance wrappers, and pension vehicles. The quarterly report is an exercise in data aggregation from incompatible systems. The actual composition of the portfolio at any given moment is unknowable without manual effort.

In a wallet-native world, that picture collapses into a single, real-time view. Every position is current. Every transaction is settled. The client can see what they own without waiting for a report.

If your value proposition is primarily operational — reporting, custody coordination, execution — much of what you charge for gets automated. If your value proposition is advisory — portfolio design, risk management, tax structuring, behavioural coaching — the transparent environment makes your advice more visible, more measurable, and harder to replicate.

What actually changes day-to-day

Portfolio construction expands. McKinsey projects that the 60/40 model gives way to multi-asset portfolios spanning public markets, private equity, real assets, infrastructure, and digital instruments. Tokenisation is the enabler. When private equity units, real estate positions, and infrastructure exposure can all be represented as tokens with standardised interfaces, the construction toolkit gets richer. The wealth manager who can design coherent portfolios across this expanded universe becomes harder to replace. The one who can only pick from a fund platform menu does not.

Custody becomes strategic. The SEC confirmed in 2025 that tokenised securities carry identical custody obligations to traditional ones. But the options differ: digital-native custodians like Fireblocks and Finoa, traditional custodians adding DLT through partnerships like State Street–Taurus or CACEIS–Taurus, and integrated platforms like Securitize. Custody choice determines what assets a client can hold, which chains they access, and how collateral moves. Treating it as a back-office decision is a mistake.

Collateral management opens up. J.P. Morgan's Tokenized Collateral Network already enables pledging tokenised money market fund shares as collateral within seconds. State Street's Kim Hochfeld pointed to the 2022 UK mini-budget crisis: tokenised fund holdings could have served as instant collateral, preventing the liquidity spiral that forced distressed selling. Helping clients monetise holdings without selling them, and optimise borrowing costs across their balance sheet, is a concrete advisory capability that tokenisation creates.

Cross-jurisdictional structuring intensifies. A Dutch client holding a German eWpG bond token, a Luxembourg UCITS fund token, and a US Treasury token on different chains faces a compliance and tax puzzle that no automated system solves. The wealth manager's role in structuring and timing transactions across jurisdictions gets more complex and more valuable.

Client education becomes load-bearing. Fidelity's Cynthia Lo Bessette was direct: tokenising an asset is the easy part; building the ecosystem for utility is the hard part. State Street's Hochfeld confirmed that most current work is education, even at the institutional level. Clients who do not understand tokenised products will not allocate to them. The firm that becomes the trusted explainer builds a relationship advantage that compounds over time.

The margin question

There is a tension the industry has not squared. Tokenisation delivers real operational savings — Franklin Templeton has cited cost reductions of up to 82 percent on blockchain rails versus legacy infrastructure. Those savings will eventually compress fees, because clients and competitors will both expect efficiency gains to be passed through.

The logical move: use what tokenisation saves on operations to build what advisory expertise commands. Automate the back office. Invest in portfolio construction, cross-jurisdictional structuring, and client education. The firms that pocket the operational savings without upgrading the advisory proposition will find those savings evaporate under fee pressure. Same dynamic as the shift from active to passive: the firms that lost were not the ones whose products were disrupted, but the ones whose advisory model could not justify its fees independently.

When operational infrastructure gets automated, the only defensible value is the quality of thinking about what should be in the portfolio and why.

Where this leaves Dutch wealth managers

Dutch wealth management has a recognisable pattern: methodical evaluation, rigorous compliance, careful implementation. The AFM's approach — technology-neutral, efficient, demanding — reinforces it. That culture is a genuine asset.

The risk is that "doing things properly" drifts into "waiting for perfect clarity" — and in infrastructure transitions, clarity never arrives before the window narrows. Luxembourg already hosts the first fully tokenised UCITS. Germany has a functioning electronic securities law and a growing tokenised bond market. France is certifying smart contracts.

Dutch firms have what this transition requires: regulatory credibility, deep client relationships, and a tradition of prudent innovation. But leading is a different posture from following. It means understanding the infrastructure landscape before you need it. Building advisory capabilities around tokenised portfolios before clients ask. Engaging with MiCA, the DLT Pilot Regime, and the Market Integration Package as strategic inputs, not just compliance obligations.

The new job description

Written out, the wealth manager's role in a tokenised world looks different from today's. Portfolio architecture across an expanded asset universe. Fluency in custody infrastructure and chain selection. Understanding of cross-jurisdictional token standards. The ability to explain structural changes to clients without jargon. And above all: the judgement to know which innovations serve the client and which are solutions looking for problems.

In a landscape of over a hundred platforms each claiming end-to-end capabilities, the client's need for an independent advisor who can separate what works from what is marketed has not diminished. It has grown. The fiduciary duty does not change. The toolkit for fulfilling it does.

The question is not whether your firm needs a new job description. It is whether you write it yourself or let the market write it for you.