Edward Jones CEO Penny Pennington Champions 'Giving While Living'

A growing share of Edward Jones' 9 million clients are transferring wealth to their heirs before they die, a practice CEO Penny Pennington calls "giving while living."

In an interview with Fortune, Pennington said clients are abandoning the traditional model of saving everything for a posthumous inheritance. Instead, they are establishing gifting arrangements and trusts while still alive — and for two deliberate reasons.

"They want to enjoy seeing their impact, and they want to test whether there is a values alignment across the younger generations to see if family values are transferring successfully," Pennington said.

Testing values with money

Pennington offered a concrete scenario: families with multiple children, where one is financially stable and another struggles with spendthrift tendencies. Parents in that situation often want to leave equal inheritances for fairness, yet worry about how the struggling child would handle a sudden windfall.

Her proposed solution: give a smaller amount now, while the parents are alive, encourage the child to use it wisely, and adjust the final inheritance based on the result. The early gift functions as a test run.

Other use cases are less about discipline and more about timing. Parents can support a child who chose a meaningful but low-paying career, or help younger family members with a down payment in a tight housing market — at the moment the money matters most.

Values reinforcement is not the only motive. Pennington pointed to a simpler driver: the joy of helping people you love while you can still see the result.

The conversation gap

The practice remains easier in theory than in execution. A research study commissioned by Edward Jones found that more than a third of Americans do not plan to discuss wealth transfer with their families at all. Even fewer say they feel confident about arranging an inheritance.

The obstacle, according to Pennington, is emotional. Money talk triggers anxiety, and that anxiety complicates sound decisions.

"We know that every generation is shaped by systemic, historical events that define their relationship with money," Pennington said, citing those who grew up in the Great Depression — an experience marked by constant scarcity and a total unwillingness to spend.

Each generation since has developed its own approach to talking about and spending money. What has not changed, she noted, are the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that money decisions provoke.

Her prescription: work with a financial advisor, who can offer context on how financial decisions shape a life — not just portfolio guidance.

AI as a listening tool, not a replacement

The rise of AI financial tools might seem to threaten advisory businesses like Edward Jones. The evidence suggests otherwise. A Fortune report earlier this year found that while many people turn to AI with financial questions, they still want to discuss the answers with a human.

Edward Jones and LPL Financial are both adopting AI rapidly — not to replace advisors, but to understand clients better. Pennington said Edward Jones uses AI to identify common financial scenarios and the emotions attached to them.

"For example, we've had 700 conversations in the last month about emergency pet surgery, and 3,000 conversations about a special RV trip a client has been saving for and is about to take," she said. The firm securely stores those conversations to track how each client's financial picture evolves.

The signal for the industry is clear: as AI commoditizes financial information, firms are competing on the human conversation — and on knowing, in granular detail, what their clients actually worry about.