What I Learned Speaking at Milken

The View from the Top of Private Wealth

I had the privilege of speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on a panel about private wealth and the future of financial security. Alongside Ida Liu (HSBC Private Bank), Jed Laskowitz (J.P. Morgan Asset Management), Peter Beske Nielsen (EQT), and David Blanchett (PGIM DC Solutions), moderated by Maneet Ahuja, Editor-at-Large at Forbes and Founder of ICONOCLAST.

It’s rare to sit at a table with people who collectively manage or advise on trillions of dollars in assets and walk away feeling like you learned more than you taught. But that’s exactly what happened.

Here are a few things that stuck with me.

Volatility Is the New Normal—and That’s a Planning Problem

Ida Liu of HSBC Private Bank opened with a stat that framed the entire conversation: the VIX has been in the 20s post-COVID, whereas in the prior decade it averaged in the low teens. Volatility isn’t an anomaly anymore. It’s the baseline.

But here’s what I found most interesting: Peter Beske Nielsen of EQT made the connection between volatility and why people aren’t spending in retirement. Everyone sees the headlines, the market swings, the daily noise. So they don’t touch their savings. They take 4% withdrawals when they should be taking 8% or 10%.

His point was simple: our obligation as an industry is to take that volatility mindset out. Move capital into long-term investments where daily market swings don’t dictate behavior.

That resonated with me on several levels. First, it connects to something I’ve written about before: lifespan-based financial products are fundamentally uncorrelated to market volatility. When your returns are driven by mortality data rather than equity markets, daily swings don’t dictate your portfolio performance.

But Peter’s insight also connects to the behavioral side. The number one fear people have in retirement is running out of money—not necessarily because they don’t have enough, but because they don’t know how long they need it to last. Without that data, volatility becomes paralyzing. With it, you can build a plan that actually matches your timeline.

The Longevity Literacy Gap Isn’t Just About Consumers

David Blanchett of PGIM DC Solutions said something that crystallized what I’ve communicated in different ways over the years: longevity literacy among financial advisors is worse than among consumers.

He cited surveys showing that 80-95% of advisors use a multiple of five as the retirement end date in financial plans. Almost none of them personalize longevity based on client-specific data. Meanwhile, the gap in life expectancy for a 65-year-old between the top and bottom decile is over 10 years.

This is the problem we’re looking to solve at Abacus. You can’t build the best financial future without knowing how long the plan needs to run. And if advisors aren’t incorporating lifespan data, their clients are making Social Security decisions, withdrawal rates, and allocation choices in the dark.

David also pushed back on something I said—that longevity risk is the biggest threat people face in retirement. He pointed to recent survey data showing that inflation, healthcare expenses, and changes to pension policy all ranked higher than longevity risk in consumer minds.

He’s right that it’s not top of mind. But I’d argue that’s because we’re not providing the data. When we show clients their probabilistic lifespan, the number one response is: “No way I’m living that long.”

That tells me the problem isn’t that people don’t care about longevity. It’s that they’ve never been given the information in a way that feels real and actionable.

The Decumulation Problem Is Behavioral, Not Mathematical

David Blanchett of PGIM DC Solutions reframed another aspect of our current financial system to me: we don’t have a retirement savings crisis. We have a decumulation crisis.

Americans aren’t great savers, but people who retire today are generally better off than they were during their working years. The problem is what happens next. You give someone a pot of money and say “go spend this over the next 30 years,” and they freeze. If you spend 40 years watching your account balance grow, you don’t want to watch it shrink—even if that’s exactly what it’s designed to do in retirement.

David’s solution: shift people from a balance mindset to a lifetime income mindset. People don’t spend balances. They spend income. And that framing—turning assets into a paycheck—is what actually moves the needle on spending behavior.

I think he’s absolutely right. And I’d add: you can’t frame lifetime income without knowing the lifetime. That’s where lifespan data becomes the foundation of every other decision.

The Wealth Transfer Is Changing Everything

Ida Liu of HSBC Private Bank brought up a stat I’ve heard before but hadn’t fully internalized: $100 trillion is transferring to the next generation, with $30 trillion of that going to women.

Millennial and Gen Z investors aren’t just optimizing for returns. They want impact. They want portfolios aligned with their values. Ida gave an example of a client who said, “I think plastics are the nuclear waste of the century—help me build a portfolio that expresses that view.”

And they’re more focused on health than any prior generation. They’re not drinking as much. They’re tracking everything with wearables. They’re thinking about longevity and healthspan in ways their parents never did.

This generational shift is why I believe healthspan—not just lifespan—is going to be the pillar of private wealth going forward. It applies to women, millennials, and anyone serious about making their assets last as long as they do.

AI Is Augmenting, Not Replacing

Everyone on the panel agreed: AI is a tool, not a replacement.

Ida Liu of HSBC Private Bank talked about efficiency gains—teams using AI to streamline client service, automate processes, surface insights faster. Jed Laskowitz of J.P. Morgan Asset Management mentioned AI spending research on public and private companies, automatically redacting information that can’t be shared across teams—something that used to take days.

We’re seeing it in underwriting. AI can summarize a 1,000-page medical file in seconds. What used to take actuaries days now happens almost instantly. That doesn’t replace the actuary. It makes them better.

But AI doesn’t replace the advisor. It doesn’t replace the human judgment, the empathy, the ability to sit across the table from a family and understand what they actually care about—not just what the spreadsheet says.

As Peter Beske Nielsen of EQT put it: AI radically improves the percentage of people globally who get advice. That’s a huge win. But the winners in this space will still be the people and firms who combine technology with judgment.

What I Took Away

Sitting on that stage, what struck me most was how much everyone agreed on the fundamentals—even when we approached them from different angles.

The common thread: people need better information to make better decisions. Whether that’s lifespan data, portfolio construction, tax transition, or understanding when a wealth transfer is likely to occur—the more specific and personalized the information, the better the outcome.

That’s what we’re building at Abacus. And it was humbling to hear from people managing trillions in assets that we’re all solving pieces of the same problem.