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Six months of fieldwork, 3,600 affluent investors, more than 30 markets: EY challenged Aaru to recreate its 2025 Global Wealth Study with a simulation, blinded. Aaru never saw the survey’s results. The run finished in a single day.
The task
How Aaru demonstrates superior accuracy
Advisor retention after inheritance, three measures:
The result
A six-month study, replicated in a day.
The benchmark
The Global Wealth Study is EY’s annual research on affluent investors. The 2025 edition surveyed 3,600 of them across more than 30 markets. The fieldwork took six months and cost seven figures.
In August 2025, EY’s Wealth & Asset Management team challenged Aaru to recreate the study — blinded. Aaru never saw the survey’s results until its own run was complete. Aaru built simulated investors from demographic, behavioral and sentiment data: national censuses, financial institutions, social media. The full run took a day.
- 3,600Affluent investors in the original study
- 30+Markets covered
- 53Single-choice questions evaluated
- 6 monthsTraditional fieldwork
- 1 dayAaru simulation
- 0.90Median Spearman correlation
Where it matched
Across the 53 matched questions, the simulation tracked the original survey at a median Spearman correlation of 0.90. The average difference was 7.1 percentage points per question. Agreement was strongest on trust, value perception and attitudes toward personalization.
Where it diverged
On inheritance planning, recommendation likelihood and portfolio review frequency, the simulation broke from the survey. Each break ran the same way. The survey recorded what investors said they would do; the simulation came closer to what investors do.
The clearest example is the advisor-retention question above. Asked whether they would keep their parents' advisor, 82% of heirs said yes. The simulation predicted 43%. Industry studies show 20–30% actually do. Provider consolidation followed the same pattern:
The consolidation contradiction
Preference for a single financial provider — three measures
Why answers diverge from behavior
The gap between what investors said and what they do has causes a survey cannot escape. Three stand out.
Inheritance is an intangible scenario. Answering means imagining a parent’s death — something few people want to picture — so answers default to loyalty.
The event may sit ten or twenty years away. At that distance, people cannot see their future finances clearly, so they project today’s circumstances forward. Researchers call this projection bias.
The questions came from wealth-management providers. When the firm asking is the firm you would be leaving, answers bend toward the polite yes — response bias, built into the study’s design.
“AI simulation isn’t just a scalable alternative to traditional research — it’s a powerful complement that uncovers richer, more predictive intelligence.”
EY Insights, October 2025
Repeatable research
The population outlives the report, and follow-up simulations let you dive deeper into any result. After a tariff announcement, a rate change or a competitor’s move, the same population can be rerun; within 24 hours it projects how investor sentiment and behavior are likely to shift. No recruiting, no fieldwork.
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