Families have started asking their offices for things that appear nowhere in an investment mandate: a structured education programme for the third generation, a means of holding a dispersed family together, an answer to what the money is actually for. Research from IMD and the Family Business Network finds offices accepting that work — moving from a discreet mechanism for investment administration toward a coordinating platform for family strategy, talent, governance and identity — while the governance underneath it has not moved at the same pace.
A mandate that has genuinely widened
The evidence for this is more concrete than the framing might suggest. More than half of family offices surveyed report an intentional shift toward strengthening family identity, cohesion and long-term purpose, alongside the financial mandate. Structured education, professional development pathways, and, in a growing number of cases, wellbeing support are increasingly part of what family members expect from the office — provision that would have sat well outside a traditional job description a decade ago.
This is not simple mission creep. It reflects a different view of what a family is actually trying to protect. Financial capital is the easiest form of family wealth to measure, but it is not the only form at risk across a generational transition. Human capital — family members’ capacity to make good decisions — and social or reputational capital can erode as easily as a poorly managed portfolio, and the case for treating the family office as responsible for all of these, not the financial one alone, is not hard to make.
Where the expanding remit runs into a governance gap
The same research finds governance struggling to keep pace with the scale families are asking their offices to manage. Nearly half of respondents still lack a formal investment policy statement or a fully functioning investment committee. Few have clearly defined performance metrics or a robust risk-management framework. Set beside a mandate simultaneously expanding into education, identity and next-generation development, that is a striking gap: offices that have not yet formalised their core investment governance are being asked, at the same time, to take responsibility for outcomes that are considerably harder to measure than a portfolio return.
The honest response is not to argue for a narrower, purely financial remit. The expansion into human and social capital reflects what families actually want, and it is neither realistic nor obviously desirable to reverse it. The more useful response treats the wider mandate as a further argument for governance discipline, not a distraction from it. An office managing family identity and cohesion alongside a portfolio arguably needs clearer decision rights than one managing a portfolio alone, precisely because the terrain is more subjective and more prone to disagreement.
Competing for people, not only for deals
Professionalisation is not confined to investment. Family offices increasingly compete directly with private equity firms and institutional investors for talent, offering structured compensation and long-term incentives to attract professionals who might once have gone straight into mainstream finance. That competition has pushed many offices toward hybrid models — lean internal teams supplemented by outsourced specialists — a response both to genuine sophistication and to a persistent scarcity of people willing to work inside a single-family structure.
This talent competition intersects with the identity agenda in a way worth noting. Rising-generation family members show, in the same research, a consistent desire to shape both investment strategy and family culture rather than simply inherit decisions already made. Families that treat next-generation involvement purely as a succession exercise, rather than as a genuine input into strategy, are likely to find that desire for involvement expressed some other way — disengagement, or friction with the existing structure.
Ambition ahead of allocation
A similar gap shows up on the investment side, between what families say they want and what their portfolios actually hold. Respondents anticipate increasing allocations to private equity, venture capital and other less liquid instruments as diversification becomes a higher priority. Current allocations remain comparatively conservative, still heavily concentrated in legacy family businesses and real estate; 86% of responding families remained shareholders in their legacy business, which on average represented more than a third of total assets.
That kind of gap is not unusual for large asset owners moving deliberately rather than impulsively. It does suggest, though, that the push toward more structured investment governance — formal committees, specialist analysts, outsourced CIO arrangements — is partly an attempt to close it responsibly, rather than simply a matter of fashion.
Becoming visible, by design or otherwise
A further consequence of the broadening remit is that family offices are becoming markedly less insular than the traditional model implied. Rising-generation leaders, shaped by global networks and digital connectivity, are pushing offices toward greater engagement with peer networks, co-investment platforms and industry gatherings — a real departure from the historically private posture many families maintained. The research treats this positively, as a source of collaboration and opportunity, which it can be. It is worth adding, without overstating it, that greater visibility carries a different risk profile too: reputational exposure and a data footprint that a genuinely private office would once have avoided almost entirely. Families adopting a more connected posture are, in effect, trading some of the discretion that once defined the model for access to opportunity and talent. That is a trade-off worth making deliberately.
Several capitals, not one
The research’s central observation — that no two family offices are identical, but that recognisable patterns exist across them — is a useful corrective to how the sector is sometimes discussed. Commentary on family offices tends to treat institutionalisation as a single path every office should travel at the same pace. What this research actually describes is closer to several parallel forms of capital — financial, human, social, reputational — each maturing at its own speed and each requiring its own kind of governance, rather than one committee-shaped solution applied uniformly across the whole mandate.
What is not in question is the direction of travel. The research points toward a family office remit that increasingly extends beyond the balance sheet. Institutions built originally to serve one purpose are increasingly being asked to serve several, for the same family, at the same time — and that is a harder governance problem than the one most offices were originally designed to solve.
"An office managing family identity alongside a portfolio arguably needs clearer decision rights than one managing a portfolio alone."