The Wealth Boom: Who's Really Winning?

According to IXI estimates, consumer wealth has grown by an incredible 247% since The Great Recession. That’s more than $47 trillion in deposit and investment balance growth. In fact, in the five years between 2019-2024, wealth grew by $22 trillion. These huge increases provide marketers with considerable opportunities to grow assets under management.

However, the top line growth numbers don’t tell the full story, which is that not all consumers have been able to benefit from this wealth explosion. In fact, unfortunately most consumers haven’t been able to grow their financial portfolios despite this overall trend. Indeed, median household wealth in 2024 was $65,778 which is 13% less than in 2021. You might ask, how is this possible if during the same period overall consumer wealth grew by $5 trillion? Well, I’m glad you asked…

The answer is in what’s driving the growth. Nearly all of the growth in consumer wealth has come from the stock market’s performance. Consumers who have been able to invest in the stock market have been able to ride its growth to accumulate additional wealth, while consumers without such financial resources have been left behind. Indeed, if we break the market into three basic wealth segments, the disparity becomes readily apparent:

As you can see, the segment with the least amount of wealth, the Mass Market segment, has grown in size but not in the assets it commands. Not a great story. More households, but not more money. And where did those households come from? Well, anecdotally it appears that some Mass Affluent households slipped from having more than $100,000 in 2021 to having less in 2024. Further, with Mass Affluent assets also declining, some of the consumers still in the segment may also be worse off. For instance, households who are still in the segment may have previously been closer to the $1 million ceiling in 2021, and could have slipped in wealth but not so far as to drop them into the Mass Market definition. Hence, the 5% drop in assets.

In fact, the only positive developments are found in the Affluent segment. These are consumers who already have more than $1 million. In terms of size, the Affluent segment grew by 10% (~1.3 million households) and the assets it commands grew by 16%. This is growth for households that are already wealthy, so 16% is a substantial amount of money. 

But what does it all mean?

The obvious answer is that, in order to grow deposits and investment balances, you need to be successful in capturing Affluent consumers. While this is always the case, it’s even more critical when millionaires account for 73% of all consumer wealth. Yes, you read that correctly…11% of households own nearly three-quarters of all wealth. So in 2025, if you want to drive deposit and investment growth, you need to understand where the wealth is and how to best serve those who have it.

Equifax can help you identify and capture more of these Affluent customers or grow your share of wallet with those you already have. To learn more about how joining the IXI Network can help, visit: https://www.equifax.com/business/data-assets/ixi-network/.