Strong Stock Market, Savings Boost Global Financial Wealth To Record $250 Trillion In 2020

The pandemic didn’t hamper the rise of global wealth, a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found, according to a press release.

Global wealth levels hit $250 trillion last year amid household savings spikes, and the markets showed an unexpected resistance to the global economic troubles, the release stated.

Titled “Global Wealth 2021: When Clients Take the Lead,” the report posits that global wealth has grown in the last year and will keep growing over the next five, according to the release.

North America, Asia — not including Japan — and Western Europe will likely be the primary generators of wealth, the release stated.

There’s a category of “simple needs” people that could be of use to wealth managers, according to the release. Those people have between $100,000 and $3 million. That segment of people has $59 trillion in investable wealth and could possibly contribute $118 billion to the world’s revenue pool.

“Wealth managers often underserve those in the simple-needs segment with a standardized set of products, and the result is a poor client experience with no ‘wow’ factor,” Anna Zakrzewski, a BCG managing director and partner, global leader of the firm’s wealth management segment, and a co-author of the report, said in the release. “This is essentially a missed opportunity. To better serve this key segment, wealth managers must embrace a new approach that lets them reach a larger audience in a cost-effective and scalable way, but with a highly personalized offering.”

In addition to rising wealth, savings were stockpiled during the pandemic, particularly as people were stuck inside and also worried about the possibility of economic volatility.

PYMNTS reported that the savings stockpile around the world hit $5.4 trillion in 2020. Now that the economy is recovering and the pandemic seems to be declining, consumers are likely to start spending more again, analysts say. In the first quarter of 2021, the Conference Board global consumer confidence index reached its highest rates since 2005, with the entire world seeing new surges in interest.