One advantage to my job is the access it provides to some of the financial sector’s leading lights. These include the advisors on our Top 100 list, but also those individuals who work behind the scenes, without whom advisors, even our Top 100, would be far less effective. These are the investment strategists, product developers, sector and market specialists, traders, tax wonks, estate planners, quantitative analysts, due diligence experts and others who help advisors frame strategies and execute tactics. Our job is to transform the insights we garner from these individuals into useful pieces of journalism.

From time to time we encounter a "big idea" that is either too iconoclastic or, frankly, too tenuous to put before our audience in a traditional fashion. But these insights provide a view of how insiders see the financial landscape for wealthy individuals evolving. To avoid wasting this value, I offer here a few of the more thought-provoking predictions I have gleaned from farsighted financiers in recent months:

Everyone will eventually be a self-directed investor. In the last two decades, middle-class individuals have been forced to come to grips with a broad array of financial instruments, as responsibility for their investment well-being shifted from paternalistic entities, such as pension plans, to self-directed vehicles like the 401(k) and IRAs. Private clients, their phalanx of advisors notwithstanding, must now bear a similar burden as a result of the increasing complexity of financial instruments and markets. Failure to understand the growing palette of investment opportunities and their risks will limit a private investor’s ability to strategize effectively with—and keep tabs on—his advisor and other financial intermediaries, which is a prescription for underperformance, or worse.

Complex financial innovations are bleeding into the private client universe. Analytic tools (such as risk decomposition, Monte Carlo simulations, stress testing, etc.), processes (collateral management, volume-weighted average price execution, etc.) and investment products (structured notes, credit derivatives, securitizations, etc.) initially developed by banks and subsequently adopted by institutional investors are now migrating into the private investor domain. This allows investors to tailor their financial strategies to meet their unique goals, but it also reinforces the need for wealthy individuals to acquire a fairly advanced degree of financial understanding.

Technology will empower private investors and transform the private banking industry. Technology that gives private investors a clearer view of their finances is evolving rapidly; but clarity can lead to shock at the inefficiencies embedded in a portfolio. As private investors obtain tools that provide holistic views of their financial lives, it will transform their relationships with their advisors and intermediaries. Increased transparency will boost competition, squeezing financial product margins and rationalizing the pricing of various advisory services. This in itself will shake out much of the deadwood in the advisory universe by exposing its underperformance.

Despite all this, the "velocity of wealth" will increase. Much has been made of estimates that trillions of dollars in wealth will be made liquid and transferred across generations in the coming years. What is overlooked is that much of that wealth will disperse back into the economy at large. Wealth accrues to intelligence; unfortunately, the converse is not often the case, which explains why family wealth rarely survives the second generation. One strategist predicts an accelerated churning of fortunes, as value captured in existing family businesses is released by the dissipating behaviors of ill-prepared heirs and becomes available through the usual economic channels for investment in new wealth-creating enterprises. In a variant of the economic concept of the "velocity of money," he refers to this as an increase in the "velocity of wealth."