There are 14.6 million Millennials in the UK[1] and two million of them – 2,048,579 to be exact – are considering making an investment.

According to CoreData Research calculations, around 8 million Millennials currently have no investments, but around 5 million (4.6 million) do.

However, the 2 million who are planning to invest represent the ripest area of the Millennial market for fund managers and other providers of financial services.

Millennials are on the cusp of making the greatest investments of their lives – many will be considering buying a house, getting married and having children.

As they also move into better paid jobs and begin to grasp the importance of saving and investing, this group of individuals represents a key growth client group for fund managers in the future.

To hope for any form of success in engaging Millennials, fund managers need to get to grips with new technology and take advantage of advancements in this arena to interact meaningfully with end users – an area in which the industry has been inherently weak in the past.

Young people are, reportedly, saving more than other age groups but to hope of capturing any of those assets, fund managers need to understand what Millennials want and how to best communicate with them.

The latest CoreData Research report Millennials & Finance: Investing Habits and Motivations reveals that the most powerful advertising platform available to companies aiming to engage with Millennials is their peer group.

Young people value the opinion or recommendation of their family and friends more than the rest of the population – 30% would seek out a recommendation from a friend and 12% are driven to invest by peer encouragement. These figures compare to 16% and 2% of the broader population, respectively.

Therefore, penetrating Millennial social circles is the most effective way for providers to successfully communicate with this group of future investors.

Social circles now also include online networks and an online portal would drive 63% of the Net Generation to increase their dealings with financial advisers.

Millennials crave information. Their need and demand for accessing facts and figures is unparalleled across the generations and they expect the same level of accessibility, comparability and transparency in the world of finance.

Millennials are willing to be guided by ‘experts’ hinting that 42% would be happy to receive advice from industry professionals, yet they want to make the final decision themselves.

Traditional advertising does not resonate with Millennial consumers.

Young people have the option to by-pass adverts in their daily lives – on TV through digital streaming media services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, while surfing the web through ad-blocker applications etc. – therefore, providers need to find new ways of reaching out.

Millennials value authenticity over content.

Churning out newsletters is not the way to engage them; having a personal connection through a social media platform, for example, will lead to better creation of goodwill between a financial services provider and Millennial consumers.

[1] According to CoreData Research calculations and statistics from the Office of National Statistics