Banks With Wealth Management Arms: Mental Market Share Rankings

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Category Advantage measures the drivers of brand strength by capturing both mental availability (likelihood a brand comes to mind) and emotional closeness (how strongly consumers connect with a brand) among all competitors. Schedule a private briefing on this research. .

The bottom line up front  

Five brands, five different starting points, one shared problem: none has built a distinctive mental identity in wealth management. Wells Fargo Advisors and Capital One tie for the segment lead at 6% mental market share, but they arrived there by completely different routes — advisory heritage versus digital-banking momentum. Citi Private Bank manages billions in ultra-high-net-worth assets yet is mentally indistinguishable from PNC or TD at the national level. Together, these brands hold 16% of the category’s mental market share, but the mental advantage matrix shows a segment-wide landscape of zeros: broadly present across triggers, strongly associated with none. They convert access more than aspiration. And a brand built on access alone is a brand waiting to be displaced.

Segment Snapshot 

Brand scorecard

Brand by Brand: Where Each Stands

Wells Fargo Advisors: The Segment’s Strongest Hand

Wells Fargo enters this analysis with the segment’s most complete profile: 6% MMS, 60% awareness (highest in segment), 46% mental penetration, 6.5 network size, and a -2.1pp gap that is the narrowest among the five brands. It is the only brand in the segment that shows any positive CEP signal in the mental advantage matrix: a modest +4pp over-index on home buying and +1pp on fighting inflation. These are small advantages, but in a segment defined by flat profiles, any positive signal matters. Wells Fargo’s challenge is that its advisory brand is still mentally fused with its retail banking reputation. Its 2.7 emotional connection ties with Capital One and trails the Powerhouse average (2.65) by less than a point — suggesting that with deliberate investment in advisory-specific positioning, Wells Fargo could credibly compete at the lower end of the Powerhouse tier.

Capital One: High Usage, Low Mental Ownership

Capital One is this segment’s most paradoxical brand. It matches Wells Fargo on MMS (6%) and emotional connection (2.7) despite having no legacy wealth management identity — consumers know it primarily for credit cards and digital banking. Its 63% brand awareness is the highest in the segment, and its 44% mental penetration shows consumers are beginning to associate the brand with wealth triggers.

The Distribution Trap in Data: But Capital One’s -3.6pp gap — the widest in the segment — reveals the cost of distribution without distinction. Consumers are using Capital One’s wealth services at rates that far exceed how often they think of the brand for wealth management. This is high usage with low mental ownership. The mental advantage matrix shows no CEP where Capital One over-indexes — no trigger that is distinctively “Capital One territory.” If a competitor with stronger wealth associations enters that customer base through a workplace plan, a referral, or a digital tool, there is little brand loyalty to defend against the switch. Capital One has the reach to be a major wealth player. It does not yet have the mental architecture.

Citi Private Bank: Prestige Without Mental Presence

Citi Private Bank presents the most striking disconnect in the segment between operational reality and consumer perception. It manages substantial ultra-high-net-worth assets and competes with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan at the top of the market. But in the consumer data, it is nearly invisible: 1% MMS, 29% awareness, 2.4 emotional connection. Its 41% mental penetration marginally exceeds PNC (38%) and TD (35%), but that figure is inflated by a small base of highly aware consumers rather than broad recall. Citi’s -1.9pp gap is modest — but only because both its mental share and its estimated market share are small in the mass-affluent universe. Among the $100k+ households in this survey, Citi Private Bank is essentially a non-factor. Its brand power is concentrated in a wealth tier this data does not fully capture, which raises a strategic question: should Citi try to build broader consumer relevance, or accept a niche position? The data suggests the current brand does not support a mass-affluent play.

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PNC Wealth Management: Solid Foundation, Missing Identity

PNC holds the segment’s middle ground: 2% MMS, 31% awareness, 38% mental penetration, and a -2.5pp gap. Its 5.5 network size is the narrowest in the segment, meaning consumers who know PNC for wealth management associate it with fewer life triggers than any peer. Its 2.3 emotional connection trails the segment average. PNC’s position is instructive because it shows what happens when a meaningful regional banking franchise (strong in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest) scales its wealth division nationally without building a distinctive wealth identity. PNC has the client base and advisory infrastructure to compete — but the data suggests consumers in its footprint don’t think of PNC’s wealth offering any differently than consumers outside it think of smaller regional brands. The wealth brand has not yet separated from the banking brand in consumers’ minds.

TD Wealth: The Segment’s Lowest Profile

TD Wealth occupies the bottom of this segment on nearly every metric: 1% MMS, 26% awareness, 35% mental penetration, 2.2 emotional connection. Its -1.8pp gap is the narrowest in the segment, but that reflects symmetrically low mental share and market share rather than healthy alignment. The one counterpoint is TD’s 5.9 network size — slightly above PNC (5.5) and close to the segment average (6.0) — suggesting that the consumers who do engage with TD Wealth associate it with a reasonable breadth of triggers. TD’s challenge is overwhelmingly an awareness problem: among the consumers who know it, the brand performs adequately. But at 26% national awareness, the vast majority of $100k+ households are not considering TD Wealth at all. In a category where mental availability determines retrieval at the moment of decision, being unknown is the most expensive problem to have.

What Unites the Segment

Despite their different origins, all five brands share three structural features in the data:

No CEP ownership. The mental advantage matrix shows overwhelmingly flat profiles across all five brands. Where Fidelity dominates retirement (+9pp) and Robinhood builds around trading-adjacent triggers, these banks show zeros. They are present across many entry points but strongly associated with none. In a category where consumers enter through distinct life moments, having no moment that is distinctively yours means being considered everywhere but preferred nowhere.

Perceived as “my bank’s advisor” rather than a distinct wealth platform. The segment averages 2.46 emotional connection on a 7-point scale — second lowest of the four segments. No brand exceeds 2.7. The dashboard’s emotional connection curve shows that brands below 3.0 struggle to command meaningful share of a consumer’s total wealth allocation. These firms are likely capturing a thin slice of each customer’s portfolio, not becoming the primary relationship.

Cross-sell potential that remains under-leveraged. All five banks possess real-time visibility into consumer financial behavior that no Powerhouse or Disruptor can match: mortgage originations, large deposit events, inheritance transfers, tax-season cash flows. These are proprietary signals of wealth management readiness. But the flat mental profiles suggest these moments are not being converted into wealth trigger associations. The missed opportunity is not the cross-sell itself — it is the failure to turn banking transactions into mental links between the brand and specific life moments.

Competitive Context

Understanding where each brand sits relative to the broader category clarifies the threat landscape:

Wells Fargo and Capital One compete at the Powerhouse fringe. At 6% MMS each, they match Morgan Stanley and Edward Jones — brands with dedicated wealth advisory identities. But the Powerhouse brands at 5–6% MMS carry stronger emotional connections (Morgan Stanley at 2.9, Edward Jones at 2.5) and broader CEP profiles. Wells Fargo and Capital One are in the same mental neighborhood but built on weaker foundations. A deliberate investment in trigger-specific associations could close this gap; continued reliance on banking distribution will not.

PNC and TD sit in crowded territory with no room for error. At 1–2% MMS, they occupy the same tier as SoFi (4%), Ally Financial (2%), Ameriprise (2%), and a dozen other brands. In this zone, differentiation is everything — and neither brand has it. Digital Disruptors average 40% mental penetration on 36% awareness, meaning they match PNC and TD on recall with dramatically less infrastructure. Regional Players average 39% penetration on just 17% awareness — building brand memory more efficiently from a smaller base. PNC and TD’s national banking scale is not producing the mental advantage it should.

Citi competes in a world this data doesn’t fully capture. Among $100k+ households, Citi Private Bank is a fringe player. Its true competitive set — Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley at the ultra-high-net-worth level — operates in a tier where this survey’s sample is thin. Citi’s 1% MMS should not be read as failure so much as misalignment: its brand is built for a market that is largely invisible in mass-affluent data. The strategic question is whether Citi should extend downmarket (as Goldman has begun to do) or sharpen its UHNW focus.

The Strategic Imperative

• Each brand must claim a trigger cluster — and no two should claim the same one. Wells Fargo has early CEP signals on home buying (+4pp); it should build deliberately around the home-equity-to-investment pipeline. Capital One’s digital-banking identity positions it naturally for tax-season optimization and automated savings-to-investing transitions for younger mass-affluent consumers. PNC could own consolidation and coordination for multi-account households in its Mid-Atlantic/Midwest footprint. The segment’s flat mental profiles mean these claims are unclaimed — but they won’t be forever.

• Turn banking transactions into wealth triggers. Mortgage origination should activate long-term planning messaging. Large deposit events should trigger proactive wealth consultation. Tax-season inflows should connect to investment positioning. These are not generic cross-sell prompts — they are interventions at the exact moment when a consumer’s need is highest and the bank’s data advantage is strongest. The goal is to build a mental link between a specific banking event and the wealth brand, so that over time the trigger itself becomes a CEP.

• Separate the wealth identity from the retail brand. The “my bank’s advisor” perception caps emotional intensity. Wells Fargo Advisors already has partial brand separation; it should deepen that distinction. Capital One faces the opposite challenge: its wealth brand barely exists as a separate entity. Merrill Lynch’s partial independence from Bank of America is the instructive model — the wealth division benefits from the parent’s distribution while maintaining a distinct advisory identity that commands higher trust.

• Invest in emotional depth to protect high-value clients. Capital One and Wells Fargo both sit at 2.7 emotional connection — close enough to the Powerhouse average (2.65) that deliberate investment could close the gap. But PNC (2.3), Citi (2.4), and TD (2.2) sit in a range where the emotional connection curve shows minimal share-of-wallet capture. For these brands, every client relationship is vulnerable to a Fidelity or Schwab that offers a deeper emotional experience on a digital platform with national reach.

• Reduce friction to neutralize the one barrier banks can solve internally. Transferring assets from a checking account to an advisory account within the same institution should be the simplest wealth transition in the category. The barrier data shows that 42% of 35–44-year-olds cite minimum thresholds and 26% cite transfer fees as deterrents. Banks can address both by offering seamless, no-minimum transitions from deposit relationships into advisory services. If a consumer’s own bank cannot make this easy, no one can.

• Act before the cross-sell window closes. Digital Disruptors are expanding into banking (SoFi, Robinhood). Powerhouses are building embedded advisory platforms (Fidelity, Schwab). The window during which this segment uniquely owns the multi-product banking relationship — with real-time visibility into deposits, spending, and life events — is narrowing. The brands that convert banking data into mental wealth triggers now will build CEP links that persist. The brands that wait will find their structural advantage competed away by firms that never had a branch.

The core insight: Five brands with massive distribution, significant infrastructure, and direct access to millions of consumers. But infrastructure does not equal mental retrieval. Today, they remain too mass to feel elite, too embedded to feel specialized, too broad to feel focused. The opportunity is not scale. It is clarity. And clarity starts with each brand choosing which life moments to own.

About this research

Morning Consult conducts over 30,000 daily proprietary surveys in 45 countries covering more than 5,000 brands and 50 economic indicators. 

Our category advantage research is aimed at understanding the needs driving consumers in your category — and how your brand can own more of them. This research is built on validated principles of brand-driven growth and powered by Morning Consult’s industry-leading sampling technology.

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