A wave of senior commercial bankers and private wealth advisors is approaching retirement over the next several years, and many institutions are treating this as an internal HR exercise – a matter of identifying an internal successor and building a transition timeline. The scale of that wave is significant: roughly 20% of financial advisors plan to retire by 2035, with nearly half planning to exit the business by 2040. That’s necessary to plan for, but it’s only half the picture. 

Internal benches are thinner than they look.  

Many banks assume they have a ready successor for a senior relationship manager or market president role, only to discover during the actual transition that the internal candidate isn’t ready for the client relationships or the portfolio complexity involved. By the time that gap is visible, there’s little runway left to fix it externally. 

Client relationships don’t transfer on their own.  

A retiring banker’s book of business is built on decades of trust, and clients don’t automatically stay loyal to whoever inherits the seat. This risk is significant enough that 41% of U.S. financial advisors describe the coming wealth transfer as an existential threat to their own practice. Institutions that wait until the retirement date to think about this risk losing meaningful revenue in the handoff. Client attrition after a banker’s departure is one of the most underestimated costs in the industry. 

The external market should be part of the plan, even with an internal successor identified.  

Benchmarking the internal candidate against what’s available externally, in skill set, in book size, in client relationship style, gives leadership a clearer picture of whether the internal plan is strong enough, or whether it needs to be supplemented with outside hiring. 

Waiting too long shrinks the candidate pool.  

The strongest external candidates for a senior banking or wealth management seat are rarely available on short notice. Institutions that start the conversation only once a retirement date is finalized are often choosing from whoever happens to be looking at that exact moment, rather than the best person for the role. 

Succession planning that starts and ends in HR tends to treat the role as a box to fill. Succession planning that starts with a recruiting mindset treats it as a market to understand, well before the seat is actually open. 

The Anderson Search Group works with commercial banks and private wealth firms to map this landscape ahead of time, so a retirement date doesn’t turn into a scramble. If you have senior talent approaching transition in the next few years, it’s worth having that conversation now rather than later.