Any problem can appear at the top of a survey once. Appearing there twice is a different kind of finding. Reliance on spreadsheets and manual data aggregation was named the leading technology concern among North American family offices for the second consecutive year, cited by 42% of respondents to the Campden Wealth / AlTi Tiedemann Global Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025 — a complaint the sector understands perfectly well and has not fixed. The reason it persists has less to do with software than with a decision most offices have never formally made.
A known problem, not resolving itself
The scale is not marginal. Roughly one in three family offices requires more than half of the effort involved in producing a report to be manual — reconciling data by hand, chasing custodians for statements, rebuilding spreadsheets that break whenever an underlying data source changes format. That is a meaningful share of a lean team’s time spent on work that adds no analytical value, in an industry whose entire appeal is supposed to rest on agility and low overhead.
There is a modestly encouraging note in the same data. Document management entered the top five most-used technologies among North American family offices for the first time in 2025, which the report reads as evidence that recognition of the problem is beginning to translate into investment. Recognition and resolution are not the same thing, though, and a complaint persisting across two consecutive survey years points less to a lack of awareness than to something structurally harder: deciding who actually owns fixing it.
Why the decision defaults to inertia
Every family office eventually faces a genuine build-buy-outsource choice across a range of functions — investment management, portfolio reporting, accounting, tax coordination, compliance, cybersecurity, technology infrastructure, and increasingly philanthropy administration. In principle each of these decisions should be made deliberately, weighing control against cost and confidentiality against expertise. In practice, the persistence of the spreadsheet problem suggests a good number of these decisions are not being made at all. They default to whatever arrangement existed when the office was smaller and simpler, because nobody has been given clear ownership of revisiting it.
The trade-offs genuinely differ by function, which is why a single answer rarely serves an office well. Confidentiality weighs heaviest on functions handling sensitive family data, which argues for caution before handing core reporting infrastructure to a platform the family does not fully control. Expertise gaps weigh heaviest on functions that need specialist, constantly updated knowledge — cross-border tax structuring, cybersecurity monitoring — where an internal generalist team is unlikely to match a dedicated external specialist. Cost and scale weigh heaviest on functions with real fixed overhead. The economics of a fully internal capability also depend on scale and complexity: a highly complex office may be able to justify specialist internal infrastructure that would be disproportionate to the requirements of a simpler one.
Neither answer is automatically the safe one
It would be a mistake to read the Campden Wealth findings as an argument for outsourcing generally. Handing reporting infrastructure to an external provider does not, on its own, solve a data-quality problem. It relocates it, and introduces new questions around vendor dependency and data portability that a family may not have fully weighed. It would be just as wrong to read persistent manual processes as proof that keeping everything in-house is inherently safer. An in-house process nobody has reviewed in years, running on tools nobody has updated, is not more secure by virtue of being internal. It may simply be less visible.
The more useful frame, consistent with the research, is that the build-buy-outsource decision needs making explicitly and revisiting on a schedule, function by function — not settled once by default and left alone. An office that only reviews its technology when something breaks is, by definition, always reacting rather than deciding.
Control and confidentiality are not the same thing
Control is the argument most often raised for keeping a function in-house, and it is a real one. An internal team answers only to the family, with no competing client interests and no risk of a vendor’s priorities diverging from the family’s own. But control has a cost that compounds with complexity. A small internal technology team supporting a rapidly diversifying portfolio — new asset classes, new jurisdictions, new reporting requirements — will struggle to hold the depth a specialist external provider can offer across many clients at once. Confidentiality cuts in a related but distinct direction: a function can be outsourced and remain tightly confidential, provided the contractual and technical safeguards are genuinely in place, just as an in-house function is not automatically confidential simply because it sits inside the family’s own walls.
The trade-off most offices skip
Resilience receives the least attention of the trade-offs at stake, and arguably deserves the most. An office built entirely around a small internal team carries real key-person risk: institutional knowledge concentrated in one or two people, with no documented process to fall back on if either leaves. An office that has outsourced a function entirely carries a different risk — dependency on a single provider, with limited internal capability to step in if that relationship sours or that provider’s own business is disrupted. Neither extreme is inherently more resilient. One response is to build genuine redundancy into whichever model is chosen: documented processes that do not depend on one person’s memory, and contractual arrangements that do not leave the family stranded if a single vendor relationship fails.
A decision, not a default
The spreadsheet problem, two years running, is a symptom rather than the disease. The underlying issue is that many family offices have never made an explicit, function-by-function decision about what belongs in-house, what should be bought as a mature external solution, and what should be handed to a trusted partner entirely. As offices grow in complexity, the cost of leaving that decision unmade rises steadily. Document management’s arrival in the top five suggests some are beginning to close the gap. Whether that trend holds, or next year’s survey finds the same complaint in the same place, will say a good deal about how seriously the sector is treating operating-model design as a discipline in its own right rather than an afterthought to the investment mandate.
"An in-house process nobody has reviewed in years is not more secure by virtue of being internal. It may simply be less visible."