Wealth Management: Is It an Academic Discipline and Should Wealth Managers Care?

This article seeks to address the question of whether wealth management is an academic discipline and to encourage the wealth management practitioner community to appreciate their stake in the disciplinary advancement of wealth management as a field of study. This article relays the notion that at least some stakeholders in the wealth management community have concluded that the field of financial planning differs from wealth management. If the broader community agrees with this notion, the successes realized by the financial planning community in reaching disciplinary status cannot be attributed to wealth management as a field of study. With this limitation in mind, the article presents an assessment of the disciplinary status of wealth management by utilizing a six-characteristic framework. In this article, a conclusion is reached that wealth management has not achieved disciplinary status and recommendations are made with the aim of achieving such status.