Millennials are not just about avocado toast

SPEAKING to bankers, you'd think that millennials are some sort of alien species. Will they bite? If I stop feeding them avocado toast, will they retaliate with a snarky hashtag that I cannot understand?

Exaggeration aside, the decoding matters to many financial institutions for the simple fact that the millennials hold some US$17 trillion of the world's private wealth - a number that is estimated to jump to US$24 trillion by 2020 thanks in part to wealth transfers. They are, or will soon be, the largest part of the workforce. They are also, logically, the future.

There are some points that banks and insurers should work through to demystify the generation.

Firstly, it's a large and diverse pie. Millennials are loosely defined as individuals born from 1982 onwards. That's 35 years. By comparison, baby boomers refer to people born between 1946 and 1964 - making up an 18-year generation. Generation X roughly refers to those born between the 1960s and …