Designing for 100-year balance sheets

The article is co-authored by Nadine Esposito, CEO and founder of Wellthspan Advisory.

This is the third article in the longevity series by Implement Consulting Group and Wellthspan Advisory. Target readers: bank executives, product owners, and risk and compliance leaders in Switzerland and the Nordics.

Imagine a phone call to a bank: "I have just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. What should I be doing about my finances?"

In most banks, this call goes badly. The customer service agent has no training for it. The bank has no process for it. And under the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, the bank may not even be allowed to hold what it has just heard.

In this article – the third and final in our 2026 longevity series – we take a closer look at what banks would have to change for that call to go differently.

From wealth planning to wealthspan planning

Classic wealth planning takes a client's assets, income, risk appetite, and a retirement date and optimises a portfolio. Wealthspan planning adds four inputs most banks currently do not collect: health status and trajectory, career breaks (planned or imposed), access to care as a supply problem, and cognitive capacity and decision support.

In Switzerland, healthy life expectancy at 65 is around 14.4 years for men and 14.9 for women; total life expectancy at 65 is roughly 20 and 22 years.1, 2 The five-to-eight-year difference is the period no accumulation model prices and every household eventually pays for.

The design pattern: a health-agnostic trigger protocol

The reason banks do not plan with these inputs is not that the analytics are hard but that each input touches something a bank is structurally cautious about: sensitive data, liability, and revenue. Health information should never be disclosed in the first line of a bank – and it certainly does not need to be.

The design pattern we propose is a health-agnostic trigger protocol. The bank tells its clients, repeatedly and in plain language, that certain life events warrant a financial review, and that they can request one at any time without saying why.

The trigger is the client's own statement – "I would like a wealthspan review" – not the content of the event. The case is then routed to someone qualified to conduct it, under a consent regime designed for the purpose. It is the same governance discipline a well-run bank already applies to suspicious transactions and whistleblowing disclosures: a narrow, deliberately designed channel, not the general service floor.

The three questions bankers ask

Three questions arise almost immediately once the concept lands, and they are the right ones.

• Is this an education task? Yes, as the first and cheapest layer.
  Most people do not experience a diagnosis, a parent's move into care, or a redundancy at 55 as a financial event. Teaching them which moments warrant a financial review – a trigger list of six to ten events – is scalable and low-liability and builds trust. But it is not sufficient. Education without an advisory offer produces informed, anxious clients who take their questions to a friend, an insurer, or increasingly to an AI assistant.

• Is it a new profession, independent of banks? Partly.
  That profession will emerge whether or not banks participate, because there is unmet demand for someone with no interest in whether the money sits in a mandate, a savings account, or a long-term care policy. For banks, the practical question is not threat versus opportunity but whether the bank wants to be the institution where the referral starts, and therefore the one that keeps the relationship when the planner recommends holding more cash.
  
  
• Does it fit an AuM-based business model? Not on AuM alone.
  The conflict is real: for some clients, wealthspan planning will recommend a lower AuM outcome. Adopting the language without adjusting incentives produces a marketing layer over an unchanged model, and longevity natives will notice. The decisive argument is retention. Cerulli's research on the wealth transfer shows only around 27% of expected heirs plan to keep the benefactor's advisor, and among those who have already inherited, retention falls to roughly 20%.3 The reasons are not fees or performance – they are the absence of a relationship. A bank that is present at diagnosis, at widowhood, and at the intergenerational handover keeps both the household and the assets. One that is absent loses both.
  
  

What the Nordics show and what Switzerland has

Denmark's pension companies have spent two decades turning the pension relationship into a health relationship: PFA bundles health, critical illness, occupational capacity, and life cover with its pension products, and its EarlyCare service assigns a health guide to members on extended sick leave.

Switzerland has the opposite profile – the deepest private banking franchise in Europe, a property-heavy household balance sheet, a mature three-pillar pension system, and no institution that looks at all of it together for a single household.

That gap is a specifically Swiss opportunity, because Swiss banks are among the few institutions in the world with the long-horizon relationships, advisory infrastructure, and balance sheet to close it. In Switzerland, the wealthspan planner is more likely to sit inside a universal or private bank than inside a health insurer or a pension fund.

The wealthspan playbook: twelve months of practical work

What could a bank actually do? The playbook frames the answer for the three functions this article is addressed to:

For the executive committee:

• Decide which segment the bank is designing for and be honest about the economics.
• Add retention across life events and the mix between assets, fees, deposits, and protection to any unit's scorecard.
• Decide which insurance, care-navigation, and legal partners the bank trusts, and how referrals flow both ways.

For product and client experience:

• Define the six-to-ten life-event trigger list and write it into every touchpoint.
• Build the review as a repeatable engagement with a defined output – liquidity plan covering a care scenario, protection review, agency instruments such as powers of attorney and advance directives, and a household view.
• Deliver it via a wealthspan self-assessment inside e-banking, with human escalation where the segment allows, and in-person or home-visit versions where the client needs it.

For risk and compliance: the trigger protocol is the central deliverable, and it is largely a governance task.

• Decide where in the organisation sensitive information may be received, by whom, under what consent, and in which system – and make sure the answer is "nowhere in the first line".
• Train the service floor to recognise and route health disclosures the way they route suspicious transactions.
• Extend the same rules to the home visit, and connect them to vulnerable-customer and capacity frameworks.

The timing is right. FinSA has normalised fee-based advice. The revised data protection law has clarified what a bank may hold. The wealth transfer is already under way. And the first cohort of longevity natives is entering its peak earning years with a stated expectation that its financial institutions will plan for a hundred-year life.

The institutions that build the operating model now will be the ones that own the relationships in 2050.