2024 Global Retail Investor Outlook 2025

Executive summary For decades, individual activity in capital markets was largely through government or employer pensions but today sees a fundamental shift as individuals increasingly take ownership of their financial decisions and futures. This transformation reflects not just a temporary trend borne of a meme stock phenomenon, but a sustained evolution driven by demographic, economic and technological forces. In 2022, the World Economic Forum conducted the first iteration of its survey to examine individuals’ behaviours, preferences and knowledge of capital markets across nine global markets. The findings revealed both significant interest in markets, driven in part by favourable market conditions, and material barriers, including gaps in financial education, access and trust.Page 4 This paper explores the ways that investing can be a tool for achieving financial goals by empowering individuals to grow their wealth by participating in capital markets rather than relying on traditional savings alone. For this to happen, financial institutions, policy-makers and industry stakeholders all have important roles to play to enable access to markets, empower decision-making through education and ensure trust in the financial system as a whole.The 2024 survey, expanded to 13 global markets, built upon the earlier findings and identified four key structural trends driving individuals’ behaviours today: 1 Investors are an increasingly heterogeneous group across generations and geographies; they are keen to learn about markets, engage earlier than the previous generations and are more open to new products and to using technology to learn and invest. The longer time horizon can allow them to weather market fluctuations and benefit from the power of compounding. 2 Market volatility has introduced more unpredictability into individuals’ ability to reach their financial goals and inflationary pressures have eroded both the value of their disposable income and cash savings, opening potential opportunities for capital markets to serve as a hedge. 3 Financial products and platforms are evolving with the needs of new customers who care about affordability and transparency, use peer and social networks, prefer learning by doing, and tend to make values-driven decisions. 4 Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to enable access, personalization and efficiency at scale if employed thoughtfully. 2024 Global Retail Investor Outlook 4