I thought both private wealth management and residential real estate would be disrupted by digital technologies. The perception was that these have middle-men adding little value (i.e. just buy index funds! just use Zillow!)

However, what I missed was that these jobs aren't about objective measures and efficiency. They both come down to trust between one human and another.

While it still makes "rational" sense to use online tools, people are emotionally invested in their retirement accounts and the biggest purchase of their lives. They want to be made to feel good about it. At least half those roles are to be psychologists, which at this point, cannot be done by machines or algorithms.