Swiss judge dismisses Agnelli inheritance lawsuit Cost structure of a $10M “family office” Jensen Huang: Californian wealth tax worth it Latest UBS Family Office quarterly Living Large: The new Acquired podcast on Ferrari

The burden of wealth!

The latest UBS Family Office Quarterly is out.

UBS FOQ Q2

The latest UBS Family Office Quarterly is out.
It underscores a clear reality: the modern family office is a dynamic system navigating complexity across capital, governance, operations, and people…

The risk of not planning for change.

Why Family Office Leaders May Resist Retirement — And What to Do About It

Family office leaders often stay longer than expected. It is not just about timing, it is about identity, legacy, and responsibility. I was glad to be part of this conversation with FO Pro: The Family Office Professional on why retirement can be difficult to navigate and what leaders can do about it…

Key person risk is still a major family office concern.

What happens when your most trusted executive leaves?

In many Family Offices, stability is built around trusted individuals rather than formal structures. Long-serving executives often become deeply embedded, holding critical knowledge, managing key relationships, and acting as a trusted adviser to the family.

But when that individual leaves, whether through retirement, a career move, illness or an unexpected event, the impact can be far greater than a single vacant role…

Living Large: the finer things in life

Why Ferrari Is Unlike Any Other Luxury Brand, According to the Hosts of ‘Acquired’. The automaker is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, Ferrari has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. Get the full, incredible story from the team that produces some of the best podcasts out there - Acquired

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Lessons from Bill Ackman’s family office meltdown Cost trends for single family offices Podcasts: a profile of Toto Wolff Read: Jamie Dimon on four day weeks, the real impact of AI and a tilt at the presidency? Family office jobs in Florida, Dallas and London

Supported by Nodem

A delicious family office case study served up by Bill Ackman on X

Controversial activist investor Bill Ackman has built an $8.9 billion fortune.

He has also built a reputation as a prolific and sometimes hot-headed tweeter.

In an epic post at 2am last weekend, Ackman wrote ~2,500 words laying bare the inner working, and unraveling, of his family office, TABLE. In doing so, he inadvertently delivered the most instructive case study in family office governance the industry has seen in years.

He described how his family office had become bloated despite a largely passive portfolio, how he sent his nephew to investigate, triggering defensiveness and a major restructuring, and how he vowed to fight a legal claim from “Ronda,” a terminated in-house lawyer.

The tweet has been read more than 11 million times and has sparked lively conversations in the family office world.

So today, it’s a look at some of the topics and lessons we can learn from this.

This is where the story begins, and where so many family offices go wrong.

Hiring someone you trust might feel natural. Hiring someone because you trust them is a mistake.

Hiring friends can work, but it’s a high-risk move and one most family offices learn to avoid.

William Woodson, in his book The Family Office, identifies two primary causes of failed hires: appointing someone known and trusted but underqualified for the role, or hiring someone with the right skills but the wrong cultural fit.

In both cases, the root failure is the same: "performance expectations and metrics for success were not clearly defined up front."

Trust is the lifeblood of family offices, but it’s not a job description.

Lessons:

• Hire for competence and character, not just trust

• Define roles clearly before hiring

• Set measurable KPIs from day one

• Run a proper, structured hiring process

• Treat hiring like investment due diligence

  ---

Governance warning lights are flashing here.

There’s a wide gulf between hands-off and completely absent. An annual review is not even close to oversight.

And when expenses "ballooned," staff turnover "accelerated," and things generally went sideways, Ackman admits he saw the warning signs and looked away.

In The Complete Family Office Handbook, Kirby Rosplock is pretty blunt: "Having a trusted advisor does not mean you don't double-check and verify what your advisors are doing, how they are doing it, and how they are providing value to you and your family. Ongoing scrutiny and vigilant oversight are also keys to enduring alignment."

The principal sets the tone. If you're disengaged, your team will notice, and some will exploit it.

To be fair, often the whole point of a family office is to free the principal to focus on their core job, in Bill Ackman’s case, running Pershing Square. Ackman doesn't need to do everything himself, that’s fine. But structured oversight is still necessary.

Lessons:

• Governance is ongoing, not annual

• Implement regular reporting cadence with real KPIs

• Avoid single points of failure in leadership

• Separate duties and introduce independent oversight

• Trust, but verify, consistently

The investment portfolio was growing quietly and efficiently, while the family office managing it was doing the opposite.

Headcount and costs kept rising for a function that, by Ackman's own admission, was largely administrative. Two problems were compounding each other: costs had never been properly benchmarked or controlled, and the office had grown in a way that bore no relationship to its actual purpose.

Industry benchmarking suggests that family office operating expenses should broadly run between 1.5% and 2% of assets under management. But these are broad indications, and context matters enormously. If a family office is primarily administering passive investments, managing capital calls, and handling basic compliance, you'd expect costs to sit at the lower end of that range, or arguably below it.

A lean, admin-focused office shouldn't cost the same as one running a complex multi-asset portfolio with a full suite of family services. TABLE, by Ackman's own description, was doing the former but billing like the latter.

This raises a structural question that many principals resist asking: do you actually need a full-stack single family office, or would a leaner model serve you better?

To his credit, Ackman (with help from his nephew) seems to have drawn exactly the right conclusion: downsizing TABLE and pivoting toward a hybrid model is a rational response to what the office actually needs to do.

Continue reading full article here

What to read

This week we are recommending Jamie Dimon’s letter to JP Morgan shareholders. From AI, to four-day work weeks to a LOT of policy prescriptions (he is running for president, right?).

What to listen to

Toto Wolff: Mercedes's billion-dollar F1 boss “A tall man in a blue and white racing suit folds himself into his Porsche. Not any old Porsche, this car isn’t actually street legal. It’s designed for endurance and speed. He whispers to himself, It’s time to put my balls on the dashboard. He starts the engine. In under 15 minutes, that man will be in an ambulance, unconscious, but in under 15 years, he’ll be a billionaire.”

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Controversial activist investor Bill Ackman has built an $8.9 billion fortune.

He has also built a reputation as a prolific and sometimes hot-headed tweeter.

In an epic post at 2am last weekend, Ackman wrote ~2,500 words laying bare the inner working, and unraveling, of his family office, TABLE. In doing so, he inadvertently delivered the most instructive case study in family office governance the industry has seen in years.

He described how his family office had become bloated despite a largely passive portfolio, how he sent his nephew to investigate, triggering defensiveness and a major restructuring, and how he vowed to fight a legal claim from “Ronda,” a terminated in-house lawyer.

The tweet has been read more than 11 million times and has sparked lively conversations in the family office world.

So today, it’s a look at some of the topics and lessons we can learn from this.

This is where the story begins, and where so many family offices go wrong.

Hiring someone you trust might feel natural. Hiring someone because you trust them is a mistake.

Hiring friends can work, but it’s a high-risk move and one most family offices learn to avoid.

William Woodson, in his book The Family Office, identifies two primary causes of failed hires: appointing someone known and trusted but underqualified for the role, or hiring someone with the right skills but the wrong cultural fit.

In both cases, the root failure is the same: "performance expectations and metrics for success were not clearly defined up front."

Trust is the lifeblood of family offices, but it’s not a job description.

Lessons:

• Hire for competence and character, not just trust

• Define roles clearly before hiring

• Set measurable KPIs from day one

• Run a proper, structured hiring process

• Treat hiring like investment due diligence

  ---

Governance warning lights are flashing here.

There’s a wide gulf between hands-off and completely absent. An annual review is not even close to oversight.

And when expenses "ballooned," staff turnover "accelerated," and things generally went sideways, Ackman admits he saw the warning signs and looked away.

In The Complete Family Office Handbook, Kirby Rosplock is pretty blunt: "Having a trusted advisor does not mean you don't double-check and verify what your advisors are doing, how they are doing it, and how they are providing value to you and your family. Ongoing scrutiny and vigilant oversight are also keys to enduring alignment."

The principal sets the tone. If you're disengaged, your team will notice, and some will exploit it.

To be fair, often the whole point of a family office is to free the principal to focus on their core job, in Bill Ackman’s case, running Pershing Square. Ackman doesn't need to do everything himself, that’s fine. But structured oversight is still necessary.

Lessons:

• Governance is ongoing, not annual

• Implement regular reporting cadence with real KPIs

• Avoid single points of failure in leadership

• Separate duties and introduce independent oversight

• Trust, but verify, consistently

The investment portfolio was growing quietly and efficiently, while the family office managing it was doing the opposite.

Headcount and costs kept rising for a function that, by Ackman's own admission, was largely administrative. Two problems were compounding each other: costs had never been properly benchmarked or controlled, and the office had grown in a way that bore no relationship to its actual purpose.

Industry benchmarking suggests that family office operating expenses should broadly run between 1.5% and 2% of assets under management. But these are broad indications, and context matters enormously. If a family office is primarily administering passive investments, managing capital calls, and handling basic compliance, you'd expect costs to sit at the lower end of that range, or arguably below it.

A lean, admin-focused office shouldn't cost the same as one running a complex multi-asset portfolio with a full suite of family services. TABLE, by Ackman's own description, was doing the former but billing like the latter.

This raises a structural question that many principals resist asking: do you actually need a full-stack single family office, or would a leaner model serve you better?

To his credit, Ackman (with help from his nephew) seems to have drawn exactly the right conclusion: downsizing TABLE and pivoting toward a hybrid model is a rational response to what the office actually needs to do.

Lessons:

• Benchmark costs regularly against peers

• Align headcount with actual needs, not optics

• Match operating model to portfolio complexity

• Install cost and turnover “tripwires”

• Trigger review processes automatically when thresholds are breached

  ---

This part of the story sparked a lot of discussions on X.

Accusations of nepotism flew, along with questions about whether the nephew had any business leading a sensitive internal investigation.

Ultimately, if family office staff have a problem with a family member getting involved, they probably shouldn’t be in a family office.

There's nothing wrong with bringing in a trusted family member to conduct an internal review. In fact, when a principal has lost confidence in their leadership team, an independent set of eyes is exactly what's needed.

But it could have been handled better.

The nephew seems to have arrived without a defined role, without a clear mandate communicated to staff, and without any apparent HR or change management framework around what he was doing. Ambiguity can be dangerous.

The process should have been properly structured. And the allegations that followed, whatever their merit, were at least partly a consequence of an intervention that lacked guardrails.

Lessons:

• Define mandate and authority before launching a review

• Communicate roles clearly to staff

• Treat internal reviews like formal change processes

• Use external HR/legal oversight where needed

  ---

Culture is often the first thing to break in a family office, and once it goes, operational problems follow quickly.

Staff who feel unheard, undervalued, or poorly led don't tend to stick around. Others keep their heads down picking up their salary checks. Neither outcome is good.

The warning signs were visible for years. Turnover was accelerating. Expenses were climbing. The president became "incredibly defensive" the moment anyone looked too closely. But without governance that regularly surfaced and challenged these issues, nothing forced action.

Woodson is clear on this point in The Family Office: performance expectations must be "objective, results-driven, quantitative and qualitative" and "ongoing, open communication and feedback regarding performance and achievement of goals and objectives are also critical. Solving an issue and getting back on track quickly constitutes the best way to avoid creating a chronic issue that could result in failure."

TABLE's chronic issues had years to take root.

Lessons:

• Treat attrition and morale as core performance metrics

• Implement regular staff feedback loops

• Address leadership behavior early

• Escalate issues through formal governance channels

• Fix cultural issues before they compound

  ---

This is a compensation and role-definition failure.

An in-house lawyer at $1M+ only makes sense if the workload justifies it, if the FO was engaged in multiple direct investments, if the family is involved in complex litigation. Subscription agreements and an office move don't justify this comp.

Woodson puts it simply: "Incentives absolutely drive behavior. The family needs to be sure that compensation and incentive plans will drive behavior that leads to desired results." If someone is paid for presence rather than performance, you've created perverse incentives from day one.

Lessons:

• Tie compensation to measurable outcomes

• Align senior roles with actual workload

• Review role relevance as the office evolves

• Avoid paying for presence over performance

• Adjust incentives to drive desired behavior

  ---

Now it’s clear that we have only heard one side of the story, but it’s also clear that family offices are often the subject of nefarious legal action.

Families value reputation and privacy and this can be exploited by bad actors seeking quick settlements and NDAs.

It’s difficult not to applaud Ackman for calling the bluff of what looks, from the outside, like a shakedown.

But whatever the outcome of this legal claim, the situation raises a broader point: employment disputes in a family office carry personal, reputational, and financial risk that is qualitatively different from a corporate context.

The family's private affairs are in the room, and as Ackman discovered, terminated employees sometimes know things, about health crises, business transactions, and family vulnerabilities, that can be weaponized.

Lessons:

• Treat HR (even if outsourced), compliance, and documentation as critical infrastructure

• Record performance issues in real time

• Follow structured termination processes

• Anticipate reputational and legal risks

• Limit concentration of power and information

  ---

Whatever your view on the merits, there is a broader lesson here that has nothing to do with litigation strategy: this post exists because a principal was sufficiently distressed that he took his family office drama to the internet at 2am.

While it is entirely understandable that Ackman should feel emotional in the circumstances, it does represent a governance failure of a different kind.

Good family office structures have protocols for crisis management, external counsel relationships, and clear communication policies. As much as we love X, it’s not the forum for family disputes.

Lessons:

• Keep family office matters private

• Establish crisis and communications protocols

• Use advisors, not social media, in disputes

• Separate emotion from decision-making

• Protect reputation as a core asset

-

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Partner content by David Meister, Founder of Axiom Trust.

Trust administration is the last frontier of modernization in the wealth management industry.

Family offices know this better than most. Despite $2.5 trillion in wealth passing through trusts every year, the infrastructure surrounding it remains stuck 30 years in the past. Consequential financial decisions are being managed in email threads, PDFs, and the memory of one person who may have moved on from the company.

This is an issue I saw before in the venture capital space. At Sydecar, we modernized the VC back office. We structured auditable workflows for cap tables, compliance, carry reporting and distributions. We learned that solving this issue wasn’t just about solving the technology. It was about solving the lack of accountability that cropped up far too often in an industry where those processes weren’t automated.

Trust administration has the same problem, but the stakes are far greater, have longer time horizons, and have beneficiaries who may not be financially sophisticated and who do not have visibility into what’s happening with assets that are meant for them.

The people surrounding the trust administration industry – the RIAs, the estate attorneys, the fiduciaries, the accountants – are excellent at what they do. But the operating model they’re forced to work in when it comes to trust administration was built in a different era. What family offices, RIAs, and attorneys need now is the same level of visibility into processes and scenarios that they have in all other aspects of their client relationship. And who gets blamed when trust issues arise? They do. Currently, when things get complicated, the trust industry is slow to respond if they respond at all. They’re not handling the complexity they need to.

That’s where Axiom Trust comes in. We’re not out to replace advisors or fiduciaries; we’re there to empower them. We’re a regulated trust company, making us an accountable fiduciary as well. The AI-native platform we’ve built handles the trust administration operational layer, freeing up advisors for the important client-facing judgment calls they’ve been hired for.

Imagine trust documents automatically parsed. Monitoring and distributions are audited and explained. For every high-stakes action — a distribution, a discretionary decision — there is a reviewable decision package: the relevant trust language, beneficiary context, prior activity, required checks, clear approval trail. Built to be defensible years later, when memories have faded and relationships have changed. Complexity is the use case. Every unusual asset, contested dynamics, and multi-entity structure is accounted for seamlessly.

The goal is to help advisors protect and deepen the client relationship during generational transitions. If there’s a problem with a trust , it’s usually the advisor who takes the blame. We’re out to help advisors keep their clients informed, boosting the chance that AUM stays with an advisor during a generational transition. Information is essential for families and advisors.

We recently announced an $11.8M financing round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This backing highlights the scope of the opportunity and the model we’re using to solve it. Beyond the financing, though, are the families and advisors who’ve already begun using the platform. They understand that trust administration is only as good as the information families can get easily and accurately. It’s time for modernization in trusts and Axiom Trust is built for just that.

-

David Meister is the Founder of Axiom Trust, a vertically integrated trust company and technology platform. Axiom provides the regulated infrastructure and operational precision required by modern fiduciaries and private families—without competing for the client relationship. Find out more at axiom-trust.com.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Partner content by David Sawyer, CEO and Founder of Unlimited.ai.

Every legacy SaaS company is rushing to bolt AI onto their platform. It's easy to see why — the demos look good, the press releases write themselves, and the word "AI" commands a premium in every renewal conversation.

A static system of record with AI bolted on is still a static system of record. Their marketing changes. Their underlying limitation doesn’t.

In the last few years, family office demand for software solutions has dramatically increased. Why? 

According to JP Morgan’s 2026 Global Family Office Report, the average family office is allocated almost 40% to private investments. 

Until recently, private markets reporting data remained complex, opaque, and mostly processed manually. 

But the industry has hit an inflection point. AI advancements have dramatically enhanced capabilities and family offices are taking notice.  

The gap between before and after is not incremental. It's categorical. As one of our family office clients shared with us, “This is like going from a bicycle to a Ferrari.”

Before you saw static data on a screen, inputted manually by a human. Documents were stored in inboxes and disparate folders. A spreadsheet here for one thing, another stored somewhere else for another workflow. Siloed, static, and silent.

Today, AI agents orchestrate the core workflows with ease: sourcing data and documents from portals, extracting, reasoning with, and visualizing your data in seconds. 

But an AI-native solution’s most important enhancement is context, a glaring omission in any family office portfolio still on legacy platforms built in the pre-AI era. 

Every family office is singular, its operating practices unique to its own DNA. 

When you sized that position at 5% instead of 7%, there was a reason. When you accepted those terms even though the governance provisions were softer than you'd prefer, there was a reason. When you chose Manager A over Manager B despite nearly identical track records, there was a reason — one rooted in a relationship, a reference call, or a pattern you'd seen before.

Legacy platforms were designed to store what happened. They were never designed to capture why. And so the reasoning that drives your best decisions — the institutional knowledge that distinguishes your portfolio from a commoditized allocation — has nowhere to live. It exists in inboxes, in the memory of your longest-tenured team member, in meeting notes nobody reads twice. 

Your family office’s institutional knowledge has become an institutional risk. 

When a key team member leaves, their judgment leaves with them. When a family office founder passes away, the complex understanding of the “Why?” does too. 

The cost is hard to quantify precisely — which is exactly why most family offices have learned to live with it. But the cost is real, and it grows every year you operate on infrastructure that wasn't designed for the complexity of what you actually do.

Unlimited.ai was built to solve this problem — not to retrofit it.

The distinction matters. Building AI-native from the ground up means the intelligence isn't sitting on top of your data — it's woven into how the data is captured, organized, and reasoned with in the first place.

Laila, our expert private markets agent, doesn't just answer questions about your portfolio. She orchestrates it: extracting data from documents automatically, surfacing patterns across your holdings, connecting the performance you see to the decisions that produced it.

This isn't a feature update on a ten-year-old architecture. It's a different design philosophy — one that starts with the assumption that complex family portfolios require a fundamentally different kind of platform.

We know what that platform needs to do because we built it from inside the problem.

Our founding team spent years deploying capital into private markets at the multi-family office level — billions in aggregate across funds, co-investments, and directs in virtually every asset class. We tried to build innovative tech stacks to serve families at the highest levels and the solutions available simply fell short. That’s why we built Unlimited. 

We know what it feels like to run a quarterly family review pulling data living in four different siloed systems. We know the decision-making that happens in the room that never makes it into any report. 

Unlimited.ai was built by family office operators, for family office operators to solve the problem we’ve lived firsthand from the ground up.

The future of family office technology isn't another dashboard. It's a platform that understands your portfolio the way your best people do — to provide an intelligent operating partner that will scale with you across generations. 

If you're managing complex portfolios at the family office level and you've felt the friction of tools that weren't built for the complexity you operate in, we'd like to show you what AI-native actually looks like in practice.

-

David Sawyer is the CEO and Founder of Unlimited.ai, the AI-native investment platform built to give family offices unmatched portfolio intelligence and clarity through a single integrated system. With more than 2,400 integrations and a fund database of over 500,000, the platform delivers real-time insights that empower informed decisions. Book a 30-minute demo at Unlimited.ai →

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Addison in action

Last month, Addepar unveiled Addison, an AI assistant integrated into its platform that lets users interact using natural language.

It’s a useful feature, but not unique to Addepar: Masttro unveiled theirs last year as part of Masttro Intelligence, and earlier this year Unlimited.ai introduced their own, named Laila.

The reality is that embedded AI assistants that allow natural language interaction look set to become standard across software, financial or otherwise. 

While smaller competitors may be more nimble with releasing new features, Addepar remains the industry benchmark, the platform most competitors measure themselves against.

Established in 2009 by Joe Lonsdale (also a Palintir founder) and Jason Mirra, they’ve grown to dominate the space since.

Addepar currently serves over 1,400 companies across 60 countries, from single family offices to RIAs, and private banks, with the platform managing $9T of assets. Last year they were valued at $3.25 billion.

Like similar platforms, Addepar consolidates both public and private markets data to give family offices a unified view, and they aim to deliver a complete solution in one platform.

We spoke with Addepar Chief Technology Officer Bob Pisani to understand where family offices get the most value from it.

“For family offices, the challenge isn’t a lack of tools, but a lack of consistency across them. Fragmented data leads to disconnected workflows and makes it harder to act with confidence.

“By grounding everything in a permission-aware, fully traceable data layer, we ensure reporting, analysis and AI-driven capabilities are all built on complete, trusted data.”

Delivering immediate value 

Addepar is a powerful tool but only useful if set up correctly. Implementation is critical, and Pisani says this starts with understanding how a client firm operates.

“Family offices often manage complex portfolios with lean teams and highly customized structures, so the focus is on establishing a clean, reliable data foundation and ensuring the platform reflects their operating model in practice.”

He notes that where implementation has evolved the most is in how quickly teams can realize value.

“AI is accelerating how data is ingested and structured, but more importantly, it’s lowering the barrier to using the platform day to day—making sophisticated analysis accessible from the first interaction.”

A helpful evolution considering that, most wealth management platforms rely heavily on skilled professionals to operate effectively, something reinforced by the head of automation at a prominent multi-family office we spoke with.

They noted how Addepar was the industry standard for reporting, yet still only as good as the analyst using it: “It’s like having a fancy set of kitchen knives or cookware, you aren’t suddenly going to be Gordon Ramsay.’

Private markets benchmarking

Addepar manages an enormous amount of data, and Pisani says more than 40% of assets on platforms are Alternatives. In a segment that has historically lacked consistent, comparable benchmarks, the company uses this data to provide a solution.

“Private Fund Benchmarks address that by leveraging aggregated and anonymized data from across the Addepar platform to create quarterly and since-inception benchmarks, spanning approximately 14,800 funds, 4,900 managers and more than 115,000 underlying LP positions.” 

He says it uses contributions, distributions and valuations to calculate IRR in a way that reflects actual LP outcomes.

“Because these benchmarks are integrated directly into the platform, family offices can evaluate fund performance, understand relative positioning and analyze drivers of return in the context of their own portfolios.”

While family offices can’t compare themselves directly with others, they can assess their portfolios against broader industry data without exposing any individual firm’s information.

“That context is applied directly within the portfolio, enabling firms to understand relative positioning, identify trends, and assess how their investments are evolving over time.”

AI-enhanced insights

Addepar uses the same aggregated and anonymized dataset to simulate scenarios and forecast cash flows.

“By applying historical cash flow data across thousands of funds, family offices can model capital calls, distributions and liquidity needs over multiple time horizons—whether that’s one, three or five years out and beyond.”

“That allows teams to move from backward-looking analysis to proactive planning—aligning investment pacing with liquidity needs, preparing for major life events or expenditures, and making more informed decisions about where and when to deploy capital.”

Amid the many platform features, Pisani believes the AI assistant Addison will be particularly useful to leaner-staffed family offices, bringing workflows together and reducing fragmentation. 

“In practice, that includes everything from analyzing performance, exposures and liquidity to supporting investment decisions and reporting to family stakeholders, all within a consistent, governed environment.”

“Over time, this will extend through more proactive insight delivery, with Addison surfacing risks, trends and opportunities in context, and beginning to drive more operational workflows.” 

Augmenting human resources

Pisani adds that Addison will support workflows but still keep human judgment at the center.

“These workflows remain fully governed and permission-aware, with transparency into how outputs are generated. Actions are not taken autonomously; teams review and decide how to proceed.”

The goal is to accelerate execution, not replace decision-making. It reduces time spent gathering information and allows teams to focus on judgment and outcomes.

And while Pisani believes AI is fundamentally changing how work gets done, he doesn’t see it replacing the role of human judgment.

“For family offices, decisions are rarely just analytical. They reflect a combination of long-term objectives, risk tolerance, governance structures and deeply personal considerations that evolve over time. Advice in that context is not a model. It requires interpretation, perspective and accountability.”

-

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

By Jessica Parker, founder of JP Advisory.

Having sat on both sides of the table, inside a family office and on the vendor side, I expected this piece to land on tidy themes like understanding, communication, and trust.

I reached out to family office practitioners and technology vendors and asked them all the same question: what makes these relationships actually work over time?

The answers were more honest and varied than I expected, and in a few places both sides were navigating the same tensions without realising it. 

The focus here is on technology vendors specifically, though many of the dynamics will feel familiar to anyone managing long-term advisory or service provider relationships in a family office.

Curiosity does not stop at go-live

The word used across both family offices and vendors when describing the conditions for building a long-term partnership was curiosity.

As one operations lead at a multi-family office said: “If the team on the other side does not intuitively grasp what a family office actually is, you spend enormous energy translating. The vendors that get it right are curious about your business beyond the implementation scope.”

Michael Pacheco, Director of Sales at PCR, made a related point: “The strongest partners always diagnose before they prescribe.” Getting to the point of diagnosing requires genuine curiosity about the current challenges and environment.

Vendors who do this well build structure around curiosity. George Wilson, CEO of ONDA, launches every engagement with an in-depth face-to-face workshop. Without this approach, he argues, you cannot truly understand what a client wants to achieve, what success looks like or what they expect from the partnership.

Craig Pearson, CEO of Private Wealth Systems, encourages family offices to go deeper: ask not just “what” a system does, but “how” and “why.” Family offices that ask better questions get better outcomes.

When both sides invest in the upfront conversation properly, not as a box-ticking exercise but as a genuine effort to understand the complexity, the rest of the relationship gets easier. These foundations are what the partnership is built on.

However, there is a natural tension here: the family office needs to make a decision; the vendor needs to make a sale. Finding the right depth of conversation without turning the sales process into an indefinite discovery exercise requires good faith from both sides.

How much should family offices share? 

Curiosity only works if both sides are willing to let the other in. Privacy is a defining characteristic of this space and the instinct toward discretion is well-founded, however multiple people from both sides pointed to the cost of secrecy when it prevents a vendor from doing their job well.

Ashley Whittaker, President at FundCount made this point directly: many family offices are overly secretive about their operations with vendors. You cannot expect a vendor to deliver what you want if you do not explain the need, the cause, and the rationale. They shared the example of a family office that procured a product from a reputable vendor only to walk away mid-implementation because they discovered it could not handle unitised funds. That gap should have surfaced before any contract was signed, but the conditions for that conversation had never been created.

The operations lead at a multi-family office described the other side of the same coin: the relationships we trust most are the ones where the vendor will tell us something is not working, or is not on the roadmap, before we have built a workflow around it. That kind of candour is rare and worth a lot.

This was one of the clearest examples of both sides navigating the same tension from opposite ends. The vendor sees a family office that will not share enough. The family office sees a vendor that doesn’t flag problems early enough. 

Some vendors are addressing this head on. Chirag Nanavati, Managing Director of Asset Vantage, described an approach built on setting clear boundaries from the start: they are honest upfront about what they will and will not solve, which in turn makes it easier for the family office to be open about what they actually need.

The point is not that every family office should hand over the keys, it is that the level of access should be a deliberate decision. Ask the vendor what they need from you to do this well, and weigh that against what you are comfortable sharing, recognising that withholding context has a cost even when the instinct to do so is understandable.

The messy middle is part of the process

Even when curiosity and openness are there, the implementation will test the relationship. 

Janeen France, Chief Client Officer at Addepar, put it well: “Family offices rarely struggle because of technology - they struggle because of the complexity underneath it. The partnerships that work are the ones where both sides are willing to confront messy data, fragmented workflows, and evolving investment structures head-on.”

Most professional relationships in a family office have clear lines. This is the case with accountants, lawyers, tax advisers. Technology is different, and this can be unfamiliar for many family offices. 

I remember experiencing this firsthand when I was working inside a family office. The way our technology vendor’s client success manager approached problems caught me off guard at first. Rather than delivering a fix the way an accountant or lawyer would, they treated challenges as something we were working through together. It took me a while to adjust, but once I did, I came to genuinely value it. When I moved to the vendor side, I learned to name that dynamic early rather than hope people would adjust on their own. However, that collaborative dynamic only matters if it survives past the initial implementation.

That is when the real test begins: do both sides stay engaged once the initial project is behind them?

A CFO at a family office: “It makes a real difference when vendors work alongside us through those changes, raise issues early, and treat challenges as shared problems to solve together.”

One family office manager identified a specific structural reason: staff turnover. Every quality that makes a partnership work becomes dramatically harder to sustain when the person who built the knowledge leaves.

But this is not a one-sided problem. I have seen family offices contribute to their own implementation struggles. Assigning the most junior person to manage the vendor relationship, treating data migration as the vendor’s problem when the underlying data governance has never been addressed, or expecting a platform to work out of the box without investing internal time in configuration and testing. The family offices that get the best outcomes are those that resource the relationship properly on their side too.

The vendors who are getting this right treat sustained engagement as an active discipline. Darragh McKay, Account Exec at Asora described it as treating trust as an active job: “Reliable service, fast and transparent support, and a constant loop of listening and iterating.” This goes both ways, going on to say that “it works best when the office stays engaged and keeps priorities clear as needs evolve.” Larry Rudman, CEO of Caprimo, argued that long-term partnerships won’t develop when parties fail to commit the right resources up front. The people involved must remain through discovery, implementation, and bedding down.

Henk Jan Kinds, Partner at Pretim captured this well: “It will look different in year five than it did on day one. What makes it work is a mutual respect for each other’s path, and the honesty to navigate the hard moments without losing sight of the shared direction.” 

Not everyone agreed on when, or whether, a vendor relationship tips over into something closer to partnership, but Jay McNamara, CEO of Masttro, described a clear inflection point: “The moment a client invites you into the thinking, not just the execution, is when trust has compounded into partnership.” 

Kartik Srinivasan, President for Auria made a similar point: the best partnerships are built on a shared commitment to delivering long-term value, where both sides invest in understanding each other’s goals, with a joint effort to solve real problems.

Regardless, every person I spoke to described the same behaviors: show up, follow through, be honest, stay invested through the messy middle and beyond. The family offices who navigate this well tend to have already accepted that friction is coming. They budget time for it, they give themselves and the vendor permission to iterate, and they go in knowing the solution on day one will look quite different by day 90.

Roadmap influence 

For the relationships that succeed through the messy middle, a different question emerges: where to next?

Every family office has specific needs, but the vendor is building for a broader client base. When the product does not bend to a very specific use case, it is not a sign the relationship is broken. The healthiest relationships navigate that tension rather than letting it build up. 

One family member I spoke with was frank about it from both angles: treating every customer as a special snowflake is not good policy, but most established vendors are so slow to move that family offices do not even try giving feedback anymore.

So what does it look like when both sides get this right?

One family office manager described this as a key factor in his decision to change vendors. His previous vendor had been iterating, but not on things he valued. His new vendor actively wanted him to push on the roadmap, knowing they could roll those developments out to other clients. Both sides benefit: the family office gets a product that evolves toward their needs, and the vendor gets insight that makes the platform better for everyone.

George Wilson of ONDA sees this firsthand: each family office is unique, and their clients are the greatest sources of new reporting, analytics, and technology development capabilities. Ian Keates, CEO of Altoo, described a similar approach: "We are in regular contact with our clients and listening to their needs, often incorporating their ideas in the platform for the benefit of all of our clients."

But influence needs to flow the other way too. Ken Gamskjaer of Aleta: "The best vendor relationships are the ones where we show up and say 'have you thought about this?' We see how dozens of family offices solve the same problems. We should be the ones saying 'here is what we are seeing.'" Ashely Whittaker at FundCount made a related point: a vendor has implemented their software a hundred times. That experience is valuable, and being open to it, even when it challenges how you have always done things, can change the timeline, the cost, and the outcome of a project.

The healthiest relationships were the ones where neither side was too proud to be shaped by the other, with the family office bringing context and operational reality and the vendor bringing pattern recognition and perspective from working with dozens of other offices

What these conversations taught me

Nobody I spoke to had a formula for this. They talked early about what each side needed, they made it safe to be honest when things were not working, and they kept checking whether the alignment was still there long after the contract was signed.

As Jay McNamara of Masttro put it: "In complex wealth environments, technology partnerships succeed when they are treated as operating relationships, not procurement events. That means shared accountability, early candour when something is off track, and sustained executive engagement after go-live."

And as one family member reminded me, none of the relationship language matters if the fundamentals are not there. Their perspective was simple: outputs, outputs, outputs. Are we getting the information we need, in the form we need it, on our screen, without having to fight for it?

If there is one thing I took away from all of these conversations, it is that the best partnerships are never the ones with the warmest language. They are the ones where both sides put in the work to understand what the other actually needs, and they keep at it long after the contract is signed.

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Jessica Parker is the founder of JP Advisory, where she works with family offices as their expert generalist, providing senior expertise and hands-on capacity to move critical work forward. She has seen family offices from three angles: as Group Financial Controller and Finance Lead for a single family office managing a complex global asset base, as an advisor in PwC's Family Office team, and as a solutions architect with a family office reporting platform helping family offices globally design and implement wealth platforms.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Partner content by Dean Palmiter, Founder and CEO of Asseta.

I was at a family office conference last year and I lost count of how many times I heard the word "AI." AI was in every panel title. Every vendor booth. Every cocktail conversation. AI for portfolio analytics. AI for tax optimization. AI for document processing. AI for risk modeling. You couldn't walk ten feet without someone telling you that artificial intelligence was about to transform the way family offices operate.

And look, they're not wrong. AI is going to change this industry. It already is.

According to the latest data, family offices are three times more likely to use AI for operations today than they were just a year ago (Goldman Sachs GFO Report 2025). Over half of family offices globally have invested in generative AI in some form. The momentum is real.

But here's what nobody at that conference wanted to talk about: most family offices aren't ready for AI. Not because they lack the budget. Not because they lack interest. 

Because their data is a mess. AI built on messy data doesn't give you intelligence. 

It gives you confident-sounding nonsense at scale.

The Foundation Nobody Wants to Build

I've spent the better part of a decade working with family offices. I was first selling accounting software at Oracle NetSuite and later Sage Intacct, and now I’ve transitioned to building technology directly  for them. I’ve dedicated my time to doing this because  the single most consistent thing I've seen, across offices managing $200 million and offices managing $5 billion, is that the data layer is broken.

Not broken in some dramatic, catastrophic way. Broken in the quiet, slow way that nobody notices until they need to actually rely on it.​

​Here's what broken looks like in practice: A family office has entities in QuickBooks, entities in NetSuite, and a couple that are still tracked in Excel. Their custodian sends monthly statements in PDF. Their private equity fund administrators use three different reporting formats. Their real estate holdings are tracked in a shared drive somewhere, maybe in a workbook the controller built four years ago. Their banking data comes from five different institutions, each with its own portal and its own way of categorizing transactions.

None of these systems talk to each other. The chart of accounts is different across every platform. The entity naming conventions don't match. Transaction categories that mean one thing in QuickBooks mean something slightly different in the custodian report.

And sitting in the middle of all of it is a human being, usually one human being, manually pulling data from a dozen sources, reconciling it in a spreadsheet, and producing a consolidated view that everyone treats as gospel.

That process works. Sort of. Until you try to put AI on top of it.

What Happens When You Add AI to Bad Data

This is the part of the conversation the AI vendors skip. They show you the demo. 

The demo is always beautiful. Clean dashboards, natural language queries, instant insights. "Ask your portfolio a question and get an answer in seconds." It looks like magic.

But the demo runs on clean data. Demo data. 

Perfectly structured, perfectly labeled, perfectly normalized data that somebody spent weeks preparing. It's the equivalent of test-driving a sports car on a freshly paved track and then taking it home to a dirt road full of potholes.

When you point that same AI at the actual data environment of a typical family office, what happens? 

It hallucinates. It double-counts. It misclassifies. It produces answers that look authoritative but are quietly wrong, because the inputs were inconsistent and the system has no way of knowing that.

I talked to a family office last year that had piloted an AI reporting tool. They were excited about it, and they fed it their data and asked it to produce a consolidated net worth statement. 

The number came back $40 million higher than their internal figure.  

After two weeks of digging, they traced the discrepancy to a handful of entities that were named differently across two systems. The AI treated them as separate holdings and counted them twice. Nobody caught it right away because the output looked polished and professional.

That's the danger. 

What would have happened if they reported that $40 million dollar number?

Bad data with no AI gives you slow, manual, frustrating work. Bad data with AI gives you fast, automated, wrong answers that look right. 

And in a family office context, where you're making decisions about estate planning, tax strategy, investment allocations, and generational wealth transfer, wrong answers that look right can be catastrophic.

The 52% Problem

I'm not the only one saying this. The PEX Report for 2025-2026 found that 52% of organizations cited data quality and availability as the single biggest barrier to AI adoption. Not cost. Not talent. Not regulatory concerns. 

Data quality. 

More than half of the people trying to use AI said the data itself was the problem.

In family offices specifically, the challenge is even more acute. These are organizations where 45 to 50 percent of the portfolio is now in private markets, which means the data is inherently harder to aggregate. There are no standardized feeds from private equity GPs the way there are from public custodians. Every fund admin reports differently. Every GP has their own format for capital call notices, distribution statements, and K-1s. And most family offices are working with more than a dozen external data sources, each with its own structure and cadence.

Layer on top of that the entity complexity. A typical family office might have twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty or more entities: LLCs, trusts, holding companies, foundations, personal accounts. Each one has its own books. Each one may be on a different system. And the relationships between them, the intercompany transactions, the ownership chains, the consolidation logic, often exist only in someone's head or in a spreadsheet that hasn't been audited in years.

if this is the data environment that AI is supposed to transform, good luck.

Why the Industry Has It Backwards

The current narrative in family office technology goes something like this: adopt AI, and it will solve your operational problems. Better reporting, faster workflows, real-time portfolio visibility. The pitch is seductive, and I understand why people are buying it.

But the narrative has it exactly backwards.

You can't automate reporting if the underlying data is inconsistent. You can't streamline workflows if every entity lives on a different system with a different chart of accounts. You can't get real-time portfolio insight if half your positions are tracked in spreadsheets that get updated quarterly, when someone remembers.

AI is not the starting point, it's the capstone. It's the thing you earn the right to use after you've done the hard, unglamorous work of getting your data house in order.

And that work is not exciting: nobody goes to a conference to hear someone talk about chart of accounts harmonization or multi-entity data normalization. There's no keynote about the importance of consistent entity naming conventions. It's boring. It's tedious. It's the financial equivalent of cleaning your garage before you install a home theater system.

But it's the only thing that makes the home theater system actually work.

What Clean Data Actually Means

When I say "clean data,"what I mean is a single, unified data layer where every entity, every account, every transaction lives in one place with consistent structure. A general ledger that can handle multi-entity consolidation natively, not through manual workarounds. A system where the chart of accounts is standardized, where entity relationships are documented and maintained, where intercompany transactions are tracked automatically, and where the consolidation logic isn't dependent on one person's memory.​

​Clean data means that when someone asks "what is the family's net worth," the answer comes from a system, not from a three-week exercise in spreadsheet archaeology. It means that when the next generation takes over, they inherit a structured, documented, auditable financial picture, not a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.

And yes, clean data means that when you do deploy AI, it actually works. Because the inputs are reliable. Because the structure is consistent. Because the AI has something real to learn from.

The Uncomfortable Conversation

Here's what I'd say to any family office that's evaluating AI tools right now: before you spend another dollar on AI, ask yourself one question. If I pulled up my consolidated financial picture today, right now, how confident am I that every number is correct?

Not roughly correct. Not directionally correct. Actually correct.

If you hesitate, that's your answer. And no AI tool in the world is going to fix that hesitation. Only your data layer can.

I know this isn't what people want to hear. AI is exciting. Clean data is not. AI sounds like the future. Clean data sounds like homework. But every family office that has successfully deployed AI, and I've talked to enough of them to know that they will tell you the same thing: the AI part was easy. Getting the data ready was the real project.

Where This Is Going

I'll be honest about my bias here. I started a company, Asseta, with my co-founder Daniel Kennedy because we believed that the data and intelligence infrastructure layer for family offices was fundamentally broken and that nobody was building the right solution for it. We spent years watching family offices struggle with fragmented systems, and we decided to build a purpose-built platform to fix it.

But my bias doesn't change the underlying reality. Whether you use our product or someone else's or you figure it out internally, the math is the same. AI on top of bad data produces bad results. AI on top of clean data produces something genuinely useful.

The family offices that figure this out first, the ones willing to do the boring foundational work before chasing the shiny new thing, will be the ones that actually get value from AI. The rest will spend a lot of money on tools that produce beautiful dashboards full of numbers they can't trust.

The family offices that get the most out of AI will be the ones that invested in clean data before they invested in AI. You can't run a race car on an unpaved road - no matter how good the engine is.

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Dean Palmiter is the CEO and Founder of Asseta AI, a purpose-built accounting and data platform for family offices. Before founding Asseta, he spent nearly a decade selling enterprise software to single-family offices at Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct. He lives in New York.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Bill Ackman’s family office drama Meet the world’s youngest billionaires Lifestyle creep is a real danger Why families care what other families are doing Living Large: What sold at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

Lifestyle creep is a real danger.

Why do families care what other families are doing?

What other families are doing

We get this question all the time and while "what other families are doing" is never or should never be determinative of the practices you adopt in your own family, family office or governance - they are always insightful to families. Why? It's because these families are extremely isolated…

A practical guide to protecting family office capital.

Protecting family office capital

Many family offices exist to protect and grow wealth across generations but lack a strategic approach to risk.

In my latest blog post, I've adapted a longer form article I co-authored last year to set out a practical framework for protecting family office capital - covering everything from trusts and legal structures to liquidity, insurance, and family governance…

What’s actually different when Asian family offices allocate capital?

Western vs Asian Family Offices: Allocation Strategies Differ

Western vs Asian family offices is not really a story of one being “more sophisticated” than the other. It is a story of different capital histories, and that shows up very clearly in how portfolios are built. Asia is different…

Living Large: the finer things in life

What sold at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. The latest and 13th installment of the event saw a record 91,500 visitors and the $4.02M sale of a Picasso. But aside from a resurgent showing, perhaps most notable was the increased presence of Chinese galleries and a new five-year contract between Art Basel and the Hong Kong government to guarantee the fair’s exclusivity to the city within the region - Artsy

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience Find out more

The security needs of UHNW families continually evolve. 

We recently covered how many wealthy families still ignore cybersecurity for various reasons, one being that it’s difficult to see the return on investment when preventive measures are working.

But the mindset around security shifts fast when a geopolitical crisis escalates into full-blown war, and the world’s supposed “safe havens” suddenly look anything but.

Speaking with industry experts, one thing is clear: when risk becomes visible, security moves from a “nice to have” to an immediate priority.

Providers that are winning amidst this shift don’t consider themselves providers at all, but trusted partners that integrate seamlessly into operations.

They reduce risk by ensuring that security is considered in all key decisions, from cybersecurity and digital hygiene to physical safety, as the family moves about the world.

A need for continuous resilience

As a former head of counter terrorism at New Scotland Yard, Richard Walton understands the nature of risks and both the intent and capability of those who seek to harm wealthy families. 

“I have direct experience of tackling organized crime, terrorists, and extremist groups. In other words, I know how criminals, terrorists and extremists think and what they are trying to achieve. I also know the techniques that they use to exploit individuals and families, for instance, through the targeting of mobile devices and cyber attack software.” 

Realizing his experience could make a difference, Walton started BlackCoral to help families and family offices become more proactive across all aspects of security. 

“The world has become more complex and unpredictable in recent times and family offices need to be pre-emptive in building resilience which means getting ahead of tomorrow’s threats.”

Walton also stressed that aided by AI, the line between cyber, psychological and physical security has blurred completely.

“Resilience today has to be continuous, data driven and personal. The family offices that will thrive in the next decade are those who treat security not as a cost, but as part of their governance - part of stewardship.”

He’s built an approach at BlackCoral that ensures they cover all key potential areas of risk.

“Our model focuses on delivering resilience across the five domains of security: Physical & Buildings (CCTV etc.), Personal (digital & close protection), Personnel (insider risks, due diligence), Cyber (including taking non technical measures) and Technical - the high end area of counter eavesdropping measures.”

Merging tech and human risk

Digital threats dominate, not least with the risk of younger family members sharing too much on social media. But criminals have also become adept at infiltrating wider family office teams, so due diligence on human resources is equally critical. 

“Annual vetting, behavior profiling and psychological risk assessment aren’t signs of paranoia, they’re signs of maturity.”

Walton emphasized that digital threats are inseparable from the human element.

“In terms of cyber threats, we have a saying: ‘It is not the software that matters but the hands that use it” - in other words, the greatest risk in relation to digital vulnerability is human. If staff don’t understand basic digital security, then it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the software is!”

Charles Dalziel, who established the private client services firm Finrath & Co alongside two fellow former military officers, further echoed this point. 

“Most of what actually works isn’t especially technical, it’s people-originated and can include manipulating social networks aimed at staff or family members, impersonation over email, messaging, or even voice to push through payments or taking advantage of staff vulnerabilities.”

Doomsday scenarios

Current events in the Middle East have certainly put a spotlight on UHNW security and the need for being prepared.

“Crisis readiness, response, travel and risk management,” says Dalziel. “Clients want plans in place before they need them and we have seen this play out in real time over the last few weeks.”

He notes that with volatility increasing and safe havens under pressure, decision-making quickly becomes shaped around what matters most. 

“In particular, those elements of a principal’s life that are most personal and least visible: family, home, movement, communication, and trust – relatable sentiments we can all relate to, the difference is that certain families carry increased complexity and challenges.”

“Building in resilience, alleviating strain and stress and incorporating reliable practices is how we see ourselves adding value to families in these unique times.”

Global instability has made things increasingly personal for their clients - they were even asked by one principal for a “doomsday playbook”.

They developed something practical and proportionate, working with the client to map realistic risk scenarios. 

“These include planning for short-term disruption (civil unrest, travel restrictions, cyber incidents) through to more severe but still plausible contingencies, all the way up to a nuclear incident.”

“From there, we built a structured, tiered response plan: detailing clear decision points, pre-agreed logistics, secure lines of communication, and access to relocation options if ever required. We also ensured their residences, staff, and digital footprint were aligned to support that plan, put in place a training framework and other contingencies.”

Dalziel noted that once in place, their client’s anxiety reduced significantly. 

“The value wasn’t in preparing for an extreme black swan event, it was in creating clarity, control, and optionality.”

Dalziel also told us of two misconceptions he still encounters, the first when security is considered something you can buy as a product.  

“In reality, effective security is a system built around behavior, awareness, process, and the intelligent use of technology.”

“Another misconception is that a large, obvious, and visible security presence equals safety. In many cases, the opposite is true, i.e. visibility and attracting attention can create its own risks.”

Needed now more than ever 

AI has massively disrupted the security world, from easily sourcing sensitive information to enabling deepfakes and sophisticated data hacks. 

Put together with increased physical risks and global conflicts creating uncertainty while reducing mobility, providing security has become trickier. 

But this is exactly why taking a proactive, holistic approach now is vital. 

Every family office should ensure preventative measures are in place and prioritize security as a standard part of their operations.

Being clued into what the risks look like, ensuring your team are well-informed, and having an experienced partner to help integrate risk management - this can make all the difference.  

-

What to read

In Borrowed from Your Grandchildren by Dennis T. Jaffe looks at families that have compounded wealth over 100+ years by constantly reinventing themselves, often shifting from operating businesses into family office structures. The common thread is “generative families”: strong governance, active next-gen engagement, and a clear sense of shared purpose.

What to listen to

High Trust, High Stakes, Human Risk Inside Family Offices - this podcast episode explores what makes a family office resilient — and what causes them to fall apart. In conversation with veteran family office recruiter Mark Somers, who advocates that human capital, not financial capital, is the most important asset a family office possesses.

Support this newsletter If you enjoy this content and work with family offices, consider partnering with us. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office and related community of 75K+. Find out more

"Family offices shouldn't even try to do venture capital." 

Those were the words of a prominent venture capital manager at a family office conference last year, arguing that family offices don't have the capacity to do venture properly. 

That might have been true historically, but is it still the case?

Global family office reports show venture accounts for approximately 6% of their AUM (private equity at approximately 20% in total).

Last year PwC reported that family offices ’ share of all venture capital reduced from 31% to 26%. This is still a lot higher than the 17% figure in 2017, suggesting a trend towards growth from preservation.

Venture presents the opportunity to get in on the next unicorn that delivers outsized returns, but it’s about more than this for family offices.

They do want to ride the AI wave and benefit from emerging tech investments, but venture also provides an opportunity for more hands-on approach

A chance to utilize their own operating experience, to involve the next generation, something reflected in how they approach the category.

PwC Global Family Office Deals Study 2025

Rather than rely purely on venture funds, many family offices are pursuing direct access through private networks and communities.

Bank of America reported that of 300+ family offices they surveyed last year, venture investments were split 52% through traditional funds, 44% direct (either on their own or co-investing).

Speaking with venture professionals, it’s clear that as family offices institutionalize, they want more control over their investment opportunities across every asset class.

Johannes Wittmann, an experienced venture CFO/COO and cofounder of Techstone, has seen this shift firsthand. 

He believes part of this stems from their self-belief and experience building successful operating companies that generated their sizeable wealth.

“Families want to pick, they want to pass, and they want to size positions based on their own conviction. A fund allocation can be part of the strategy. But increasingly, families don't want it to be the only strategy.”

Yet he also sees family offices struggle going it alone since most don’t have a dedicated, experienced venture professional to source and execute opportunities that align.

“Most family offices see whatever lands on their desk through personal connections, a banker introduction, or a conference pitch. That’s not deal flow. That’s being sourced. And it's almost always skewed toward whatever sector the family already knows. Real venture sourcing is a volume game with brutal filtering.”

Wittmann says the gap between intent and capability is enormous: it’s much more than writing the check, it’s about everything that should happen before and after it.

“The bottleneck is almost never capital or conviction. It's everything around the deal. Who runs due diligence? Who structures the SPV? Who negotiates the side letter? Who monitors the portfolio afterward?” 

Family offices have evolved, so has venture

While family offices have become more institutional of late, so has the venture capital ecosystem.

How venture capital is different today compared to five years ago: 

• Focus beyond crazy revenue growth 

• More emphasis on early profitability 

• Higher due diligence standards

• Down rounds become more common 

• Dominated by artificial intelligence

• Slower exit activity, more liquidity concerns

• The rise of secondaries

The scary truth.

Two years ago we shared the 99 brutally honest takeaways from working in venture capital from the VC newsletter and community Confluence.VC, which has since been updated and is as relevant as ever.

We asked founder Clay Norris how the VC ecosystem has evolved since he first wrote that. 

“Venture capital today is where private equity was twenty years ago: the industry has institutionalized and industrialized through a few cycles, a handful of market leaders are on the cusp of going public, and the asset class has entered the post-abundance regime.” 

Norris predicts that the industry will consolidate to a few incumbent institutions, with a long tail of boutiques.

On the family office side, he’s seen increased direct investing into big-name technology startups, but expressed concern around the use of SPVs to access these.

“Navigating the SPV world is the wild west, and many multi-layer SPVs from rogue syndicate leads are floating around. I think most family offices are smart enough to realize that these are bad deals.”

And while family offices are keen to avoid the fees associated with the fund model, there’s risk involved, and he suggests they take a cautious approach. 

“There is so much adverse selection in this asset class, especially for family offices. Management fees are a tax for a more curated set of companies, but I understand the hesitation from FOs who have their money tied up in dozens of funds with illiquid assets.”

“On the flip side, I have seen family offices personally lose tens of millions of dollars trying to ‘save’ on fees by launching a direct strategy instead of going through funds as an LP.” 

A plug-in solution

Seeing these sorts of challenges led Wittmann to create what he refers to as a “plug-in VC desk for family offices” service at Techstone.

“When BNY Wealth asked family offices what holds them back from direct investing, the top answers were: ‘too time-consuming’, ‘understaffed’, and ‘need the right operator’. Those aren't problems you solve with a fund or a software platform. They're infrastructure problems.”

Techstone’s plug-in model solves this by fitting within a family's decision-making structure to handle the full execution layer: thesis development, deal sourcing, screening, structuring, and portfolio monitoring. 

“The family keeps every investment decision. We handle the operational workload. The economics work because we've built proprietary tools and workflows that deliver what used to require a dedicated team, scoped to exactly what each family needs.”

His calculations suggest major fee savings compared to the traditional 2 and 20 approach, but it’s about more than that.

“The plug-in VC desk runs on a monthly service fee. No carry, no lock-up. The family deploys directly and keeps 100% of the upside. But the real difference isn't the fee savings. It's getting back the control most families wanted in the first place.”

-

What to read

There’s a reason this is a VC classic. Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson breaks down how venture deals actually get done. Breaking down term sheets line by line so you understand where economics really sit (control, dilution, liquidation prefs) and where people might get screwed.

What to listen to

The a16z Podcast, hosted by Andreessen Horowitz lets you plug in to one of the most powerful firms in venture capital. Institutional-grade thinking on where markets, AI and capital are really heading.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Partner content by Alex Branton, Managing Partner at Nodem Capital.

If you have been following the financial press lately, you have likely noticed a fierce debate surrounding the credit markets. 

The reality on the ground is starkly different from the pessimism sometimes found in the papers, especially when it comes to Net Asset Value (NAV) loans to family offices.

When utilised correctly, a NAV facility secured by your HoldCo is arguably the most efficient, cost-effective tool available to finance your next acquisition.

Before we look at the mechanics of why that is, let’s address two common misconceptions:

1. Liquidity issues versus credit underwriting failures

Starting in late 2025, the media narrative surrounding private credit dramatically soured. This was triggered by a few high-profile frauds/bankruptcies. The data reveal that this is generally a structural plumbing issue for retail-oriented vehicles, not a systemic credit failure.

The core problem appears to be a liquidity mismatch: retail evergreen structures are offering short-term redemptions on long-dated underlying loans

The underlying credit fundamentals of the asset class remain sound. Recent data from the end of 2025 shows private credit default rates holding steady at 2.46% (Proskauer Private Credit Default Index).

Furthermore, core underwriting metrics remain robust; average leverage multiples for direct lending have stayed completely stable at around 5.5x debt-to-EBITDA throughout 2025 (Debt Market Insight Q4, Raymond James IB).

For a family office utilizing a bespoke NAV loan, retail liquidity mismatches are entirely irrelevant. Those of us operating in the institutional credit space are far less concerned than the casual observer reading the financial headlines.

2. PIKs at the OpCo vs. HoldCo

Another headline-grabbing topic is PIK (Payment-In-Kind) interest. Critics rightly point out that if used poorly, PIK interest can affect an operating company by increasing its debt burden to unsustainable levels.

However, NAV loans operate on a different plane. By placing the debt at the HoldCo level - secured by your broader portfolio of assets or shares - you are not encumbering your underlying operating companies. You gain the leverage required for growth without risking the foundational stability of the assets generating your wealth.

The family office acquisition advantage: why NAV financing works 

Once you cut through the macroeconomic noise, the upside becomes clear. Family offices have historically left substantial equity tied up in their HoldCos. A well-structured NAV facility transforms that dormant equity into an agile war chest.

Here is why it’s such a powerful acquisition tool: 

• Speed: Traditional acquisition financing can be a grueling, months-long slog of underwriting, syndication, and red tape. In competitive environments, cash is king, and speed is the ace. Because a NAV loan is backed by your existing HoldCo shares or a designated portion of your assets, it can generate the capital fast.

• Cost of capital: By collateralizing the loan against a diversified pool of assets at the HoldCo level, the risk profile is lower compared to a standalone leveraged buyout at the OpCo level. This structural safety can translate into a cheaper cost of capital for your family office.

• Cutting through the complexity: One of the biggest hurdles family offices face is borrowing against illiquid or hard-to-value private assets. NAV financing providers understand this - we do not rely on rigid, third-party formulas. Where items are more difficult to value, we work directly with you to establish a sensible, transparent valuation methodology. We operate as a partner, supporting you through the entire process to unlock your capital safely and efficiently.

The bottom line 

While the media focuses on retail redemption gates and theoretical debt burdens, the smartest money is quietly optimising its capital stack and moving quickly on time-sensitive deals.

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Alex Branton is the Managing Partner at Nodem Capital, a leading investment firm that delivers tailored Net Asset Value (NAV) financing solutions to GPs, LPs, and Family Offices. The firm underwrites and provides facilities against complex baskets of illiquid global assets.

Led by Branton, a Cambridge Associates alumnus, Nodem Capital is authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and backed by leading institutional investors, including the Lepercq Group. The size of their solutions ranges from $20m to over $100m.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Benjamin Vaschetti

More wealth means more ultra-high-net-worth families with complex lifestyle demands. This is fueling significant growth in concierge services, an approximately $750 million market that is expected to top $1 billion by the end of decade.

At the same time, lavish spending on experiences has become increasingly popular, with travel and wellness of higher priority than collectibles like cars and watches. 

Increased visibility is certainly a factor. The more wealth is showcased on social media, whether publicly or within private circles, the stronger the pressure to spend and show off.

For family offices and wealth management firms, there’s an extensive opportunity in adding concierge-style services to their offering, either directly or through a preferred partner.

We met Benjamin Vaschetti, founder of family office concierge partner Maison Benjamin, for a coffee to find out how this works.

As a former chef, his experience in Michelin-star restaurants and working with billionaire families on superyachts exposed him to the demands of wealthy families.

It inspired him to create a structured concierge offering for family offices, acting as a partner to oversee coordination and execution while the family office teams retain full visibility and control over client relationships.

And rather than through informal, ad-hoc support, concierge services are handled with the same structure, control, and accountability that are usually applied to financial matters. 

“A common misconception is that concierge services are simply about access or making reservations. In reality, at Maison Benjamin, it’s about providing structure, oversight, and accountability, approaching relationships with a long-term, investment mindset.” 

While Maison Benjamin does do work with individuals that don’t have dedicated teams, their focus is on their family office clients.

“We primarily work with SFOs, MFOs and their principals, mainly based in the US, with a strong presence among GenX and an increasing number of Millennials, particularly from the fintech industry.” 

Concierge services require a global solution, and his team is strategically spread across time zones in the US, Latin America, and Europe, with someone currently onboarding in the APAC region. 

“This allows us to remain agile while ensuring continuous coverage and a single, accountable point of contact for family offices especially when principals are traveling.”

Vaschetti himself has lived between New York and Miami for years, speaking articulate English but with an accent that immediately reveals his French origins.

He’s benefitting firsthand from the increasing demand for intangible assets such as well-being and curated experiences, particularly from the younger generation. 

“In a post-COVID era, this can be as simple as renting a villa on a cliff in Costa Rica and working remotely spending a few months with loved ones - staying fully connected and operating a business as usual, yet still treating it as a meaningful experience.”

Travel and access are key concierge offerings, and Maison Benjamin is no different.

“Our most in-demand services include structured travel planning and support, day-to-day lifestyle task management, and securing access to highly coveted events, ranging from major sporting events such as Formula 1 paddock club to the World Economic Forum in Davos.”

Vaschetti says family office clients typically start with a 90-day pilot program that allows them to observe the value before committing further. 

“After that, we move to a flexible monthly retainer never requiring a yearly commitment, so clients don’t feel locked into anything, with certain services like tickets or events occasionally involving separate sourcing or access fees depending on complexity.” 

He notes there’s no strict budget threshold when it comes to their services, but the value increases with complexity, when they work on multi-layered projects. 

“More than spend, it’s the complexity, discretion, and need for structured execution that make a dedicated concierge to a family office worthwhile, especially as travel support becomes paramount when issues arise such as delays, weather disruptions, or last-minute changes and there are many.”

And while technology has significantly improved connectivity, information access, and his team’s ability to coordinate services, it’s still secondary.

“At our level, tech remains a support tool - true value still comes from human judgment, relationships, and the ability to execute with discretion and precision.”

Part of this comes from actually visiting the destinations and partaking in the experiences clients may be interested in. 

“This allows us to advise with real insight, ensuring we know what to recommend and avoid with certain experiences, destinations, or hotels based on specific client profiles and expectations.”

Vaschetti recently returned from a trip on the Venice Simplon-Orient Express, as well as a tour of southern Africa scouting luxury safari lodges.

“Despite the exceptional level of luxury offered, some clients would not be comfortable with bush flights and bumpy landings on remote airstrips between lodges details that only firsthand experience can truly inform.”

Maison Benjamin works with numerous trusted partners who are well-versed on the privacy and often time-sensitive expectations of wealthy families. 

Like any service industry, things don’t always work perfectly, which is where Vaschetti and his team will jump in, going the extra mile to help clients where corporate concierge companies wouldn’t.

“Back in December, nine suitcases were left behind at an FBO in Florida following an

aircraft change due to a technical issue,” says Vaschetti, highlighting an example. “The cost to ship them overnight to our client in South America would have exceeded $12,000, so we personally took the first available flight to Bogotá and delivered the suitcases directly to the principal’s residence.”

Extreme lengths that Vaschetti and his team are willing to go to have certainly helped their success, but it’s reliability that matters most.

“An unexpected lesson has been that trust is built far more through consistency than through standout moments. Over time, it’s the reliability, discretion, and ability to deliver quietly again and again that truly defines each relationship.”

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Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

HOOKE private longevity clinic in London.

In a townhouse just off Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair you can have a full body assessment that promises to help you on the journey to live not just longer - “but more importantly healthier and happier”. 

Welcome to Hooke London, one of a flurry of new medical concierge clinics springing up across the world designed to help the worried-well learn more about their bodies. 

With the aim of allowing them to make better informed choices about how to look after themselves, and to provide advice on the best medical professionals to meet their needs.

Access to a central townhouse filled with doctors, nurses, physios and other medical professionals doesn’t come cheap. 

Hooke London membership starts at £14,550-a-year ($19K) which gives clients “unlimited access to an elite team of medical and healthcare experts, expedited referrals and 7-day a week concierge support”. The enhanced Healthspan+ membership, which includes “an annual investigation and nutrition and fitness plan”, sits at £28,500 ($38K). 

The clinic is the brainchild of Lev Mikheev, a Moscow-born theoretical physicist turned hedge fund manager, who became fascinated in “health optimisation” after suffering burnout. 

“He was surprised by how much of a difference it made to his fitness and wellbeing,” his daughter and Hooke London’s chief executive Kate Woolhouse tells us in conversation. “He started running marathons and cross country skiing, doing things he didn’t think he was capable of.”

Like many other very wealthy people Mikheev’s interest quickly turned to “longevity science”. But, he didn’t take it anywhere near Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur spending about $2 million-a-year on a strict scientific diet and exercise "blueprint" regime that he hopes could reverse the aging process and allow him to extend his "don't die" philosophy for as long as possible.

“We’re not here to help people live to 100 or 150 - it’s about allowing them to live well and healthily for as long as possible,” Woolhouse says in one of the plush consulting rooms in the Brooke Street clinic.

“It’s much more about changing attitudes to health - taking a preventative proactive approach, rather than being extremely reactive as most people are.”

Interest at all ages

The most popular tests are in-depth blood analyses, and if they detect vitamin deficiencies Hooke offers a single tailor-made pill to match each client’s need. The clinic also offers CT and MRI scans which can detect diseases like cancer, heart disease, and organ abnormalities before symptoms appear), and ECGs to detect arrhythmias, heart damage, or structural issues.

Woolhouse had expected that most clients would be on the older side, but was surprised by how many twentysomethings signed up - bringing the average age to the mid 40s. 

“It’s all sorts of people interested in health: Either they have a specific concern,” she says. “Or they worry they’re so busy they could be neglecting their health and want someone to do the work for them.”

Most of the clinic’s members are based in the UK at least part of the year, but there are more European clients than Brits, and a growing number of Americans.

“They are all high net worth people who work hard and travel often,” she says. “Our aim is to fit into their busy people’s lives, and to be a single point of contact through whom they can access all of the healthcare.”

Family office involvement

Woolhouse says many clients are referred to Hooke via family offices, which are taking an increasingly proactive approach to managing their families’ health.

“Keeping the entire family well is important for wealth preservation,” she says. “A decline at the top, middle or bottom can have a great impact on the whole family.”

Ahmed El Barkouki, chief executive of Echelon Health, a rival health clinic that operates in London and Dubai, says: “Family offices are built to manage complexity. They oversee wealth, governance, succession planning, investments, risk, compliance, staffing, and security – often across multiple jurisdictions and generations. Yet one of the most significant risks to continuity, performance, and decision-making is frequently left unmanaged - healthcare.”

El Barkouki says family offices that “integrate” health screening into their strategy are able to spot developing issues early, and “protect a family office’s most valuable asset: its people.”

Hannes Hofmann, former head of the global family office group at Citi Private Bank previously noted how family offices are increasingly becoming “responsible for a family’s human capital, especially when it comes to preparing the next generation for succession”. 

“Assisting families with healthcare management is a logical evolution,” he shared in a Citi report titled Navigating healthcare for principals and families. “Logical as it may be, however, healthcare management represents unfamiliar territory for many family office executives.”

He advised that family offices explore three models - and ultimately pick and choose between them. The first is the “donor model” in which families are likely to be able to “receive priority access to leading specialists, treatments, and facilities” at medical institutions to which they have donated philanthropically. 

The second option is the “healthcare advisory model” in which the family members’ medical records are aggregated and stored centrally allowing immediate - secure - access when needed. The providers of this service also employ, or have direct access, to leading specialists and researchers who can provide second opinions on all types of medical conditions and treatments. 

The third option is to sign up to a medical concierge service like Hooke. Similar services are available across the world with, perhaps naturally, a strong contingent in Switzerland - including Clinique La Prairie and SIP Medical Family Office. 

Growing concierge services

The US, though, is by far the biggest market with an estimated 22,000 medical concierge physicians in the US. 

Among the biggest in the US is Private Medical, which charges $40,000 per adult and claims to serve more than 1,000 wealthy families, with offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, New York and Miami. 

Big US hospital groups including Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mount Sinai and the Mayo Clinic now offer concierge packages. MedStar Health, a major system in the Washington, DC, area, recently launched a Signature concierge practice

Overall, the US concierge medicine market was worth an estimated $20.4bn in 2024, according to Renub Research, which expects it to grow to more than $48bn by 2033. 

“The rise in affluent, health-conscious populations, especially in urban areas, has significantly boosted demand for concierge medicine,” Renub said in its 2025 market report. “Busy professionals, executives, and retirees are increasingly willing to pay for premium healthcare that saves time and delivers personalised attention.”

At Hooke in London, Woolhouse says it is the personal relationships that build up over time that matter most to clients. 

“Your health is a real long term relationship, if your medical team knows you really well and knows your history they will keep you healthier,” she says. “We want to build those long term relationships, so we can build resilience in clients, so they can bounce back from whatever knocks they face.”

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Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across our website, social media and newsletters, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Great families preserve values and traditions across generations, and their family offices have to continually evolve to stay relevant and effective.

In recent years this evolution has become a revolution: with better technology and global mobility, many modern family offices look almost unrecognizable compared with just a few years ago.

Some of the most sophisticated family offices today don’t even have an office at all, instead operating from laptops, with a team of two or three coordinating advisors across multiple jurisdictions.

This is the Virtual Family Office model.

These families have rejected the traditional family office approach. Instead of hiring large in-house teams and establishing expensive infrastructure, families are building small internal units that coordinate a global network of specialist advisors.

Simply put, they are building family offices without the office.

Traditional SFO costs

The economics of traditional Single Family Offices go a long way in explaining why.

Most industry studies estimate the operating cost at somewhere between 0.5% and 1% of assets under management each year, which might not sound that dramatic until you run the numbers.

On a $300 million fortune, that could mean operating costs of $1.5 million to $3 million per year. Add technology systems, office space, and compliance infrastructure, and the annual operating bill can balloon.

High costs, but often not high enough to attract top-tier professionals, especially if you’re not in a family office hub.

The CEO of a $1B+ Vitual Family Office based in Portugal emphasizes this:

“The principal wants a small footprint. With the advance of tech and the opportunity to leverage off services offered by custodian banks and some managers, we can get more done with fewer than in the past. Also, finding the right talent in Portugal is challenging, so virtual allows access to US and other talent.”

Lack of activity

Another problem can arise when the volume of transactions is low. Unless there is a steady flow of dividends from an operating company or investment income, a highly skilled team can end up sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

A BNY Wealth study found that 76% of family offices expect to make ten transactions or fewer each year. Not exactly thrilling work for a CIO at the top of their game.

A-players won’t stick around.

A typical alternative has been the Multi-Family Office, where multiple families share infrastructure and professional staff. Multi-family offices can provide high-quality services, and the model works well for many.

But it usually involves compromises.

Services are often standardized, and advisors may not be fully aligned with a single family’s interests. Some families are also uncomfortable sharing infrastructure or information with other clients.

The VFO approach

Instead of employing a large internal team, a VFO maintains a small central group to coordinate external professionals. Those professionals effectively work as fractional employees.

Operating with this VFO model means the family can work with the best of the best. A multi-million-dollar CIO can effectively be hired for a fraction of the cost.

In many cases the core team consists of just one to three people, as the principal of a Canadian VFO notes:

“We operate in a lean fashion — I am responsible for the day-to-day management of the office, including investment oversight and execution. I work closely with a few specialists and contract generalists on an as-needed basis.”

Often a senior advisor works alongside a family member and an operational manager. Their job is not to execute every task internally, but to manage the ecosystem around the family’s wealth.

Tax advisors, lawyers, asset managers, accountants, and philanthropy specialists all remain external. But they are coordinated by the central team, which ensures that the various advisors are working in alignment and sharing relevant information.

A senior family office advisor working in this manner puts it down to scale and costs:

“Our AUM simply doesn’t justify the structure of a Single Family Office… the biggest advantage is agility, flexibility, and cost efficiency — with very little time spent managing personnel.”

But they also note the approach doesn’t come without its own set of challenges.

“The biggest misconception is that it’s seamless; in reality, the main challenge is team coordination, knowledge transfer, and keeping information flowing across a virtual setup.”

Alignment as the primary value

The VFO structure resembles a control tower: the core team sets strategy, manages governance and ensures the family receives coherent advice across all areas of its wealth.

As always in the family office world, definitions get muddied.

Some firms describe themselves as VFOs while serving multiple families. In reality, that’s simply a Multi-Family Office using a decentralized team and fashionable terminology.

A genuine VFO typically serves only one family.

The professionals supporting the structure usually work for many clients, but the coordinating team is dedicated solely to the interests of a single family.

This distinction matters because the primary value of the model is alignment. The central team works exclusively for the family and is responsible for selecting, monitoring and replacing external advisors where necessary.

Some families now manage substantial wealth with just a senior advisor, an operations manager and a family representative overseeing the process. Everything else is outsourced.

Investment management may be handled by external managers or specialist firms. Legal structuring is provided by law firms. Tax compliance is handled by accountants. Performance reporting is delivered through specialist software platforms.

This approach also offers a degree of flexibility that traditional offices struggle to match.

When an external advisor fails to deliver, they can simply be replaced or their services not renewed. There’s no internal restructuring, no employment disputes, no legacy staffing issues and often no stress.

Leadership

For the central team, it is vital to maintain clarity of strategy.

With a small group coordinating a wide network of advisors, discipline and prioritization become essential. The early focus is often on building a coherent framework for decision-making before aggressively pursuing returns.

As our Canadian VFO principal puts it:

“We overcame the challenges by taking our time in the beginning. We broke down our goals in order of priority and followed through on execution one step at a time. Sacrificing return short-term by exercising patience and focusing on process was how we have progressed, and it has worked to our benefit.”

Technology

Technology has made all of this possible. Twenty years ago, coordinating advisors across several continents would have been extremely difficult. Today it’s routine.

Portfolio reporting systems can aggregate investments across multiple banks and asset managers. Financial planning software allows families to model wealth across multiple generations and jurisdictions.

Secure digital document vaults store everything from trust deeds to tax filings. Video conferencing allows regular interaction between advisors in different time zones. Electronic signature platforms mean transactions can be executed almost instantly.

As a result, the entire infrastructure of a family office can now exist digitally.

A digital structure allows families to access the best expertise globally rather than being constrained by geography.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality can actually improve under this structure.

Large family offices often employ dozens of people, and with larger teams comes a greater risk of information leakage.

A virtual structure keeps the core team extremely small. Sensitive information remains close to the family, while external advisors receive only siloed information necessary to perform their specific role.

Defying definitions

The rise of the VFO reflects a broader shift in how wealth is being managed: wealth management has become more modular. More digital. More global.

In reality, family offices rarely fit neatly into one neat category.

We like clean definitions, but each family’s needs, scale and circumstances are subtly different.

The VFO model shows what can be done. It shows the expanding toolkit.

And many families borrow elements from the VFO concept, blending a smaller in-house team with a curated network of external specialists.

The result is often a hybrid structure, combining the control and alignment of a dedicated office with the flexibility, efficiency and global reach of a virtual model.

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What to read

What I Learned About Investing from Darwin is a fantastic book on investing by Pulak Prasad, and you learn a lot about evolution too! Prasad argues that investors should stop trying to be too clever. Avoid big losses, buy solid businesses, and then do very little while they compound over time.

What to listen to

In the latest episode of The Family Office Sherpa (part of the Mr Family Office podcast network), Shaun extols the values of keeping the investment office simple. The most effective family offices don't build investment complexity, they build clarity.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 75K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across 𝕏, LinkedIn and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more

Özge Dogan

Türkiye has one of the fastest growing high-net-worth populations globally, and over 6,000 individuals with $10 million or more - including 35 billionaires.

But while it may be a regional power, and increasingly popular superyacht destination, it doesn’t have a highly developed wealth management ecosystem. 

As a second-generation member of a wealthy Turkish family, Özge Dogan discovered this first-hand when she became involved in both the family business and wealth planning.

She quickly realized the long-term perspective wasn’t always a priority when dealing with private banks and big name consultancies.

“Wealth management in emerging markets is often viewed as a transactional task rather than a generational culture,” says Dogan. “Shifting that mindset toward risk management and long-term governance requires significant effort and education, but it is the only way to ensure a legacy outlives its creators.”

More second and third generation-led families are emerging in Türkiye, but the concept of a family office is still in its infancy. 

Finding a generational-focused solution proved difficult, so Dogan started her own in 2021, the Karman Beyond multi-family office. 

With a background in law, her approach to wealth was naturally led through the lens of governance and preservation.

“In trying to understand our goal as a family, I realized that managing family wealth is a multi-dimensional task; it’s about designing a financial future while navigating complex risks and managing family dynamics.” 

She also notes that despite today’s dynamic investment landscape being more complex, this isn’t the primary focus at Karman Beyond.

“The world doesn't need another asset manager; there are already world‑class banks, financial institutions and funds doing that. What families actually lack is a trusted orchestrator. Our team brings together expertise in law, investment banking, and financial markets to act as the family’s advocate.” 

Rather than asset management, Dogan believes Karman Beyond’s role is to ask the tough questions, to monitor performance, and ensure accountability.

Headquartered in Istanbul, with a dedicated team of seven across Istanbul, London, and Dubai, they offer in-demand services like investment planning, risk management, succession planning and estate structuring, as well as relocation and immigration support. 

Growing a business that services wealthy families, Dogan has realized that expertise alone isn't enough. 

“Character matters enormously in this work. Families let you into their most private decisions about succession, conflict, and legacy. You need people who are not just technically excellent but fundamentally trustworthy.”

Chatting with Dogan it’s clear she is set on creating the support structures that families in more established wealth hubs already have access to.

She’s recently launched a new venture, the Generational Wealth Society (GWS), with a mission to empower driven, ambitious, and responsible next gens.

“Being born into a legacy is both a privilege and a profound weight; expectations can often overshadow one's personal identity,” says Dogan. “I created GWS with Nafi Emir Sürmeli who is the 4th generation family member, as a safe space for heirs to grow both intellectually and emotionally.  

The aim is to help them transition from passive inheritors to making an impact, with its origins informed through her own struggles. 

“Earning a seat at the table where my family’s future was being decided was a journey in itself. I had to prove my readiness, demonstrate my competence, and often navigate the friction of conflicting visions within my own father.” 

GWS functions as a private club, offering a community app, financial education initiatives, and hosting workshops, cultural expeditions, and roundtable discussions where members can share experiences in a closed-loop environment. 

“We are developing an educational program that focuses on cognitive and executive function. We also have an integrated news agent in the app that filters global reports and market insights specifically for our demographic.”

Members must either be wealth inheritors or involved in their family business, and aged between 21 and 40. 

“Most are already active in their family businesses or wealth management structures, or are in the process of preparing for those roles through international education and external professional experience. Our members are curious, looking to expand their vision and understanding.” 

GWS also aims to support a more collaborative succession process, and encourage early next-gen engagement.

“One of the biggest hurdles is the gap between responsibility and authority. If we want to stay united as a family, we must cultivate a culture of joint decision-making that leaves room for different opinions.” 

She believes families should provide a controlled environment where next-gen members can pursue their own initiatives. 

“If they aren't given the space to exercise their judgment now, they won't be ready when they eventually have to bear the full weight of the legacy or the entire wealth for the family. It’s about building the 'accountability muscle' before the stakes become absolute.”

Most GWS members are based in Türkiye, but Dogan sees opportunity for the community to expand globally, especially in other emerging markets.

And while she understands her home country can be volatile, she views this as an advantage that keeps her and her peers agile.

“Türkiye is a land of incredible momentum; the growth we’ve seen over the last two decades has bred a generation that is exceptionally ambitious and resilient. Being at the heart of this energy is a massive advantage.”

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What to read

The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge argues that the strongest organizations are those that continuously learn and adapt as systems, rather than relying on individual leaders or rigid hierarchies. For family offices, the lesson is simple: build institutions that learn and transfer judgment across generations, rather than depending on one principal or investment style.

What to listen to

The Privileged Few podcast is equal parts amusing yet insightful. It’s self-described as “the only show that dares to spill the secrets of the top 1%.” The truth about privilege, direct from a nepo baby.

Partner with Mr Family Office Reach 65K+ family office community professionals & UHNWIs. Across (our expanding!) social media and the newsletter, Mr Family Office connects with an engaged global family office audience. Find out more