The clients in their thirties want three things, and none of them is a stock tip.

An estimated eighty to ninety trillion dollars will move from one generation to the next over the next twenty years, most of it in North America and Europe. The precise number is a guess and the direction is not: the largest transfer of private wealth in recorded history is underway, and most of the recipients are between thirty and fifty-five.

They behave differently from their parents, and the difference is not about taste. They index because they read the arithmetic: a fund charging one and a half per cent against a market return of seven takes a fifth of the outcome. They ask for the fee schedule before the first meeting. They hold more cash than the models say they should, partly because they have lived through two crashes, and they are more willing to say the words 'I don't understand this' out loud.

A real case. A founder, thirty-two, sold a minority stake. She has four million dollars of stock in one company, forty per cent of her net worth, a mortgage, and a plan to buy an apartment. The questions were: how much of the stock to sell and when, how to exercise options without triggering a tax bill she cannot pay, whether the apartment works if the company's value halves, and whether to fund a foundation now or at her death. None of it was about picking stocks.

The technical work is unglamorous: concentrated stock risk, tax lots, the step-up in basis at inheritance, charitable vehicles, insurance, and borrowing against illiquid assets instead of selling them. The order of operations matters more than the cleverness. Selling the wrong lot, or exercising an option in the wrong calendar year, costs more than any manager selection she will make this decade.

The harder work is family. Most of these clients will inherit a portfolio built for someone else's tax position, risk tolerance and lifespan, and they are expected to be grateful for it. The business that has been in the family for sixty years is the hardest thing to sell, and it is often the right thing to sell. Someone has to say that out loud, in a room, without being paid per transaction.

The industry's answer so far has been next-generation programmes: a hotel ballroom, a speaker on disruption, canapés. The clients I meet find it faintly insulting. What they respond to is a written scope, a flat or tiered fee agreed in advance, and an email answered on a Sunday. If most of the money is indexed, the firm earns less per family. That is the trade, and it is a better business than the one it replaces.

The generation arriving with the money asks better questions than the one leaving it. Firms that treat that as an audit will struggle. Firms that answer it plainly will keep the families.