Succession Planning in the Modern Family Office: Beyond the Transfer of Wealth

Succession is often described as a transfer of wealth.

For a modern family office, that description is becoming increasingly incomplete.

Assets may pass from one generation to another, but so too can control of companies, voting rights, investment responsibilities, relationships with advisers, knowledge accumulated over decades and responsibility for the family office itself.

That makes succession as much an organisational and governance question as a financial one.

The scale of the wealth transition provides the backdrop. Cerulli Associates estimates that US$124 trillion will transfer through 2048 in the United States alone, with US$105 trillion expected to pass to heirs and around US$18 trillion to charity.

Nearly US$100 trillion of the projected transfer is expected to originate with Baby Boomers and older generations.

Family offices sit particularly close to this transition because they frequently exist for the explicit purpose of organising capital across generations.

Yet evidence from the sector suggests a striking gap between that long-term ambition and the formal preparation taking place inside many offices.

The succession gap inside family offices

UBS’s Global Family Office Report 2026 surveyed 307 family offices across more than 30 markets, representing families with an average net worth of US$2.7 billion.

The research shows considerable professionalisation on the investment side.

Some 68% of surveyed family offices had formal financial-performance measurement processes and 60% operated with investment committees.

Succession looked very different.

Only 35% had a defined succession plan for the family office itself, while just 27% had a structured process for educating and preparing the next generation for future roles.

This distinction is important.

A family can have detailed arrangements governing what happens to its assets without necessarily having an equally detailed answer to what happens to the institution managing those assets.

Who understands why the portfolio is structured as it is?

Who holds relationships with banks, managers, lawyers, trustees and counterparties?

Who understands the history behind important investment or governance decisions?

Who has authority when the principal is no longer making those decisions?

And what happens to the professionals working inside the office when leadership changes?

These are different questions from identifying who ultimately inherits the wealth.

Wealth succession and family-office succession are not the same thing

The difference becomes easier to see by separating several elements that are often grouped together under the single word succession.

There is wealth succession: how ownership or economic benefit passes between generations.

There is family succession: how responsibilities, influence and participation change as generations develop.

There is business succession where an operating company remains part of family wealth.

And there is family-office succession: whether the organisation coordinating the family’s investments and affairs can continue functioning through a change in family or executive leadership.

A modern family office can therefore encounter succession even when no assets have yet changed hands.

A founder may step back from an investment committee.

A next-generation family member may join a board.

A long-serving chief executive or chief investment officer may retire.

A family business may move from founder control to sibling or cousin ownership.

Or family members may relocate to different jurisdictions while the underlying structures remain in place.

Succession is consequently better understood as a process unfolding across the family and its institutions rather than as a single event at the end of one generation.

Why the legal structure is only one part of the picture

The August 2026 IQ-EQ report Succession Planning: A Global Guide to Trusts and Foundations for Family Office approaches succession from another important angle: the structures through which wealth may be held across generations.

It notes that traditional tools such as wills and powers of attorney may not address every issue encountered by families with complex, multi-jurisdictional holdings, and examines the role played by trusts and foundations in longer-term succession arrangements.

At a high level, the distinction between the two structures is useful to understand.

A trust involves legal ownership of assets being held by a trustee for beneficiaries.

IQ-EQ describes the separation between legal ownership held by the trustee and the beneficial interest enjoyed by beneficiaries as a defining feature.

A foundation, by contrast, generally has its own legal personality and holds assets in its own name.

The legal, tax and regulatory treatment of both varies significantly between jurisdictions.

That variation matters increasingly because modern wealthy families may have family members, businesses and assets spread across several countries.

IQ-EQ’s guide itself covers structures across jurisdictions ranging from Jersey and Guernsey to Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE, the UK and the United States.

But the existence of sophisticated structures does not remove the organisational questions surrounding succession.

A trust document can determine how assets are legally held.

It cannot, by itself, ensure that the next generation understands the family’s investment philosophy.

A foundation can provide continuity of legal ownership.

It cannot, by itself, preserve the knowledge held by a chief investment officer who has worked with the family for 20 years.

This is where legal continuity and institutional continuity begin to separate.

The modern family office has more to transfer

The widening responsibilities of family offices make that distinction increasingly significant.

The traditional image of a family office as principally an investment-management and administrative function is changing.

Today’s offices may oversee direct investments, private markets, operating businesses, property, philanthropy, risk, cybersecurity, tax coordination, family governance, reporting and next-generation education.

Citi’s 2025 Global Family Office Report found a similar imbalance between increasingly sophisticated investment functions and other areas of the organisation.

It reported significant gaps in succession planning at 74% of surveyed family offices, while 58% identified next-generation preparation as an area where what the office provided fell short of principals’ expectations.

These findings do not mean that three quarters of family offices have made no provision whatsoever for succession.

Citi’s measure concerns reported gaps in professionalisation and planning.

But alongside UBS’s findings, it points to the same broader issue: family-office institutional development has moved faster in some areas than others.

Investment processes have often been formalised first.

Succession is proving harder.

The knowledge that does not appear on a balance sheet

One reason may be that not everything requiring continuity can be documented as an asset.

Consider a family office that has operated for several decades.

Its portfolio records can show which funds it owns.

Its accounting system can identify cash flows.

Corporate documents can establish ownership.

But another layer of knowledge may exist outside those systems.

Why was one manager retained through several difficult years while another was replaced?

Why does the family avoid a particular type of investment?

Which adviser does the principal call when an unusual problem emerges?

What agreements exist informally between different family branches?

Which decisions reflect financial considerations and which reflect the family’s history, reputation or values?

Some of this can be recorded.

Some remains relational and experiential.

That makes institutional knowledge a genuine succession issue for a family office even though it does not appear in conventional estate planning.

It also explains why succession of professional executives can matter alongside succession between family members.

An office may depend heavily on a chief executive, chief investment officer, general counsel, accountant or long-standing external adviser whose accumulated knowledge has become part of its operating infrastructure.

The departure of such an individual is a succession event even when the beneficial ownership of the family’s wealth remains completely unchanged.

Preparing the next generation is another separate process

The UBS findings reveal another gap.

Only 27% of the family offices surveyed had an organised process for educating or preparing the next generation for future responsibilities.

UBS also reported that 29% saw insufficient financial or governance education as a challenge to involving younger family members.

Preparation does not necessarily mean preparing every heir to run the family office.

That assumption would overlook how different modern family arrangements can be.

Some family members may become investment-committee members.

Others may concentrate on an operating business.

Some may become involved in philanthropy or a foundation.

Others may remain beneficiaries without taking an operational role.

Professional executives may continue running the office independently of the family.

The succession question is therefore not simply whether the next generation is “ready to take over”.

It is also whether future roles have been defined at all.

This is especially relevant as families become larger.

A founder-led office may initially serve one principal and a relatively small immediate family.

Several generations later, the same institution can be serving siblings, cousins and different family branches whose lives, residences and priorities are increasingly distinct.

The institution may remain singular while the family it serves becomes more complex.

Successors may also think differently about the wealth

Continuity does not necessarily mean preserving every decision made by the previous generation.

UBS’s Next Generation Report 2026 describes the inheriting generation as spanning a broad age range, with the majority of those surveyed between 26 and 40.

It places their emergence in the context of global mobility, technological change and evolving attitudes towards purpose and impact.

Earlier UBS research also shows that the next generation is not always deeply involved in succession discussions from the beginning.

Its 2025 Global Family Office Report found that 53% of family offices had wealth-succession plans for family members, but only 26% of those with succession plans consulted the next generation from the outset.

Among families without a succession plan, 29% said the beneficial owners believed there was still plenty of time, while 21% said they had not decided how to divide the wealth.

Those figures relate to wealth succession rather than succession of the office itself, but they illustrate the broader challenge.

The generation receiving responsibility is not necessarily involved in designing the arrangements through which that responsibility will be exercised.

Cross-border families add another layer

The IQ-EQ report places considerable emphasis on the international dimension of succession.

Its 76-page guide examines trusts and foundations across 16 jurisdictions, reflecting how succession arrangements can encounter very different legal systems when families and assets cross borders.

Its introductory discussion makes an important general point: the appropriate treatment of any wealth-holding structure is highly dependent on the circumstances involved, and the legal and tax position can be complex.

For the modern family office, internationalisation can extend well beyond the location of the assets.

The founder may live in one country.

Adult children may live in several others.

An investment company may be incorporated elsewhere.

Trustees or foundation administrators may sit in another financial centre.

Operating businesses can span several jurisdictions.

The family office itself may employ people across multiple locations.

That means a generational transition can change not merely who owns the wealth, but the legal and regulatory environment surrounding parts of it.

It is another reason why succession increasingly sits at the intersection of family governance, organisational continuity and professional legal and tax work rather than belonging neatly to any one of them.

From founder’s office to family institution

Perhaps the most significant succession challenge is also the simplest to describe.

Many family offices begin with one person.

The founder built the business, knows the history, understands the assets and ultimately makes the decisions.

The office around that individual can become increasingly sophisticated while still remaining dependent on the founder’s judgement.

The transition to a genuinely multi-generational family office changes that model.

Decision-making can no longer rely indefinitely on one person’s memory or authority.

Different generations, family branches and professional executives may all need to interact with the institution.

This is where succession connects directly with the central theme of the modern family office.

Professionalisation is not only about hiring more specialists, creating investment committees or installing better reporting technology.

It is also about whether an organisation designed around one generation can continue functioning when that generation is no longer at its centre.

The data suggests that this transition remains unfinished across much of the sector.

UBS found sophisticated financial measurement at 68% of surveyed family offices and investment committees at 60%, but a defined family-office succession plan at only 35% and an organised next-generation preparation process at 27%.

That gap may ultimately be one of the clearest tests of whether a family office has become genuinely institutional.

Managing wealth during the founder’s lifetime is one challenge.

Building an organisation capable of remembering, adapting and continuing after the founder is another.

And for a family office whose purpose is measured in generations rather than years, the second may prove every bit as important as the first.