The $124 trillion opportunity banks are missing

Jason Henrichs is the CEO of Alloy Labs and a longtime fintech operator and investor.

Your 85-year-old customer just passed away. Her daughter walks into your branch with a shoebox full of account statements, a handwritten will that mentions three banks you've never heard of, business partnership documents for a flower shop that closed five years ago, photos she doesn't recognize, and tears in her eyes. She needs help navigating the mess her mother left behind, but you can't even tell her what accounts her mom had at your bank without logging into 3 different systems to find her small business checking, personal savings, and a CD.

This scene plays out thousands of times daily across America. It's also a $124 trillion missed opportunity.

Here's what we get wrong about the great wealth transfer: it's not a tsunami. It's a decades-long trickle that's already started. By 2048, an estimated $124 trillion will change hands between generations, but that transfer is happening gradually as families age, plan, and eventually pass on their legacies.

The real opportunity isn't waiting for the inheritance event. It's building relationships with the next generation during the years of planning that come before it. More than half of American families navigate these transitions without proper preparation. Nearly $50 billion sits unclaimed in state treasuries because families don't know what they're entitled to or how to access it.

Legacy planning isn't just about wills and trusts. It's about organizing a lifetime of financial complexity: insurance policies, retirement accounts, safe deposit boxes, business interests, real estate holdings, family photos, and all the memories that give money meaning. All of it needs to be thoughtfully organized, accessible, and transferable.

Banks are perfectly positioned to solve this problem. They're perfectly positioned to profit from it. It is also an existential threat if they don't build these relationships. So why aren't they?

The trust gap that's costing your customers

Here’s a sobering stat from Accenture. “Banking and banks risk becoming largely invisible infrastructure. Just 29% of consumers trust their bank a lot to look after their long-term financial well-being, compared with 43% two years ago.”

Meanwhile, 93% of financial services clients say they want estate-planning advice, only 22% report receiving it. 

This isn't just a service gap. It's a trust gap. And trust is the one thing community banks have always been able to deliver better than their big bank competitors.

I've spent years watching community banks struggle to differentiate themselves. They talk about relationships. They boast about local decision-making. They promise personalized service. But when life gets complicated - when customers face inheritance, caregiving, or planning for their own mortality - most banks disappear.

That's not relationship banking. That's transactional banking with a friendly face.

The network effect

Legacy planning is rarely a solo effort. Customers bring their children, siblings, and spouses into the process. Each planning conversation deepens the relationship not just between family members, but with the bank providing guidance.

When that planning happens at your institution, it naturally drives consolidation. The accounts needed to fulfill inheritance plans are right there. The trust relationships extend across generations. The switching costs become exponential because you're not just changing banks - you're disrupting carefully laid plans.

Consider this scenario: A customer has been with your bank for 30 years. Three years before he passes away, you help him organize his legacy plan — not just his will and trust, but his small accounting practice, rental properties, photo albums, and even instructions for caring for his vintage car collection. His three adult children, who had never banked with your institution, spent those three years working alongside their father and your team to understand and prepare for the transition. When he passes away, all three have already moved their primary relationships to your bank. They weren't just customers — they were family.

That's the network effect in action. That's also the future of customer acquisition.

Beyond digital transformation

The banking industry loves to talk about digital transformation. We invest billions in mobile apps, AI chatbots, and omnichannel experiences. But we often miss the most important transformation of all: becoming genuinely useful during life's most difficult moments.

Legacy planning doesn't mean abandoning technology in favor of file boxes and hand-written wills. It means using technology to provide human guidance at critical touchpoints. It means building systems that can track complex family relationships, automate routine tasks, and surface important decisions before they become crises.

The institutions that get this right won't just survive the great wealth transfer. They'll orchestrate it. They'll become the trusted partners that families turn to when life gets complicated.

The competitive advantage of care

Community banks have always competed on relationships. But relationships aren't just about knowing customers' names or remembering their kids' birthdays. They're about showing up when it matters most.

The next wave of banking innovation isn't just about faster payments or sleeker interfaces. It'll be about helping families plan, protect, and pass on their legacies. It'll be about turning the most emotional and complex financial decisions into manageable, guided experiences.

The banks that embrace this opportunity will build something their competitors can't easily replicate: genuine irreplaceability. When you help a family navigate the death of a loved one, you don't just earn their business. You earn their loyalty for generations.

The future of relationship banking

The great wealth transfer is happening — with or without your bank. The question is whether you’ll be facilitating it, or watching it pass you by.

Forward-thinking banks are already moving. They see legacy planning as the future of relationship banking — not just managing transactions, but guiding families through the most meaningful financial decisions of their lives. To deliver that kind of guidance at scale, banks need more than good intentions: they need tools built for the task. Legacy planning is complex, emotional, and deeply personal. It demands technology that can organize the details, put forward the right decisions at the right time, and supports banks in their role as a trusted advisor. That’s why digital platforms are an important part of the solution — not a replacement for relationship banking, but an enabler of it.

At Alloy Labs, we set out to find digital platforms that could support our member banks in this role. They can help level up legacy banks with user experiences that smooth over the major, life-changing financial transactions.  We looked for tools that could offer secure document storage, guided estate planning workflows, and the ability to preserve not just financial assets, but personal legacies and life stories. The best platforms in this space also offer seamless, co-branded experiences that deepen the customer’s connection to their bank — not the tech provider.

One such solution, Paige, stands out because it’s built for banks that prioritize long-term relationships over short-term transactions. Beyond digitizing estate planning, it brings empathy and clarity to a process that’s often overwhelming for families. Its design supports the kind of trusted guidance that customers expect from their community bank, not a tech startup. That’s why it fits so naturally into the future of relationship banking: it enhances, rather than replaces, the human element. We invested in Paige through our Alchemist Fund because of its robust planning features, a bank-friendly model and a mission aligned with community institutions.  

A leading user experience is not just about technology. It’s about pairing the right tools with the kind of care only relationship banks can offer — turning a $124 trillion transfer into a once-in-a-generation opportunity for relationship building. The banks that lean into legacy planning now won’t just retain customers; they’ll redefine what it means to be a relationship bank. The great wealth transfer is more than a financial event. It’s a trust event, a relevance event, a once-in-a-generation chance to step forward as the institution families rely on when the stakes are highest.