The Financial Therapist: Why Wealth Managers Now Double as Psychologists for the Super-Rich

Amir Mossanen, a wealth advisor at Wells Fargo, is seated across from a family enjoying pizza in a brightly lit conference room in Beverly Hills on a typical Tuesday afternoon. PowerPoint presentations are absent. There are no anticipated portfolio returns. Rather, he offers small incentives to clients who open up, such as decks of cards and a tiny stagecoach figurine. $1.8 billion is managed by Mossanen. His actions in this room don’t resemble portfolio management at all. It resembles family counseling more.

One of Mossanen’s best clients, an Iranian immigrant couple in Bel Air, had what he called an intervention a number of years ago. Their youngest son had left USC, strayed from the family electronics company, and appeared to be aimlessly hopping from startup to startup. Mossanen sat down with the young man and asked him about his expectations for his family, his goals, his business ideas, and his backup plan. He then returned to the parents and urged them to support their son’s entrepreneurial endeavors. Sean Rad was the son. “I think Amir helped my parents more than me,” Rad later stated. The startup was Tinder, which eventually became a part of Match Group and was listed on the Nasdaq.

That tale might be written off as an isolated incident involving a fortunate combination of skill, timing, and a perceptive advisor. However, it symbolizes a larger trend in wealth management that has been developing for more than ten years, picking up speed as the generation that created fortunes starts to consider what will happen to those fortunes in the future. The emotional aspect of wealth is no longer a side service provided by progressive advisors. It’s starting to play a major role in how the industry’s most advanced sector determines its worth.

The fundamental issue is profoundly human as well as statistical. Seven out of ten estate transitions fail, according to research by consultants Roy Williams and Vic Preisser. This means that when money is passed down from one generation to the next, family wealth and harmony decline. Seldom are the causes monetary. Nearly all of them are relational. Families that have never discussed money must now make decisions together with huge sums of money at stake and no structure for doing so. After a controlling patriarch leaves, siblings who were under his control find they are unable to work together. Adult children who were purposefully kept out of financial discussions feel both entitled to the wealth and unfit to manage it. In the upcoming decades, an estimated $30 trillion will be transferred to the Millennial generation. Most of that money will create more issues than it fixes if the emotional architecture of those transfers isn’t addressed.

Even among those who most need it, it’s difficult to ignore how uncomfortable the entire topic is. Rich people who have spent their careers projecting competence and confidence find it difficult to discuss their fears, guilt, or the complex ways their wealth has influenced their family dynamics. A few years ago, a therapist who worked with extremely wealthy clients was featured in a Guardian article discussing their ongoing internal struggles, such as lack of trust, trouble finding purpose, and shame that coexists with abundance in ways that are genuinely difficult to explain. A balance sheet does not include any of those items. They all have an impact on financial choices.

In order to address this, Mossanen created a nine-session, two-year program that begins with useful seminars on credit and investing and progresses toward something much more personal, such as goal-setting on an individual basis, candid discussions about expectations, and recordings of family sessions that can be played back later when recollections of what was said diverge. He seeks to resolve conflicts before they escalate into emergencies. Twenty of his fifty-three clients have benefited from the program, and Wells Fargo has been growing its Family Dynamics practice due to demand that, in the words of Katherine Dean, the practice’s head, involves clients “literally knocking our doors down.” A special family and philanthropy advisory unit exists at UBS. Every year, Jordan Waxman of HighTower organizes “board meetings” for family clients. These are organized retreats on Nantucket where adults submit philanthropy proposals in a Shark Tank-style format before the discussion shifts to estate planning and governance. That service costs roughly $16,000 a year, which he describes with a reasonable degree of confidence as providing returns that are “kind of infinite.”

A layer beyond family dynamics is added by the psychological research that has been attracting the interest of financial professionals. According to Jens Mazei’s 2023 research, men become more aggressive and less inclined to compromise when their masculine identity is threatened when they negotiate in areas they identify with, such as financial transactions and business dealings. Financially speaking, this tendency may lead to riskier purchases, excessive leverage, and premium-priced transactions—not because the numbers support them, but rather because giving in would be seen as weakness. It is unsettling to think that a CEO might allocate $50 million in shareholder capital to an acquisition mainly in order to avoid the subjective feeling of losing a negotiation. Additionally, it is well-documented in psychology literature and is likely more widespread than the business community would like to admit.

The goal of financial therapy and the wealth psychology that goes along with it is not to stifle ambition or soften the competitive instincts that created these fortunes. The more truthful version of the argument is that unexamined psychological drivers are typically costly. These patterns have actual costs that eventually manifest in portfolios, family relationships, and the individuals themselves. These include ambition linked to proving worth, confusing net worth with self-worth, and using acquisition as a stand-in for security. The advisors who have been developing procedures based on this realization are wagering that a more intelligent asset allocation model isn’t the most beneficial service they can provide. The family has enough structure, a room, and some pizza to finally talk about the things they’ve been putting off for years.