An office can acquire almost every visible attribute of an institution. A chief investment officer with an institutional track record. An investment committee that meets on a schedule. Quarterly performance reporting produced to a standard a pension fund would recognise. What none of that purchases is an answer to a plainer question: who is permitted to say no, to whom, and on what authority. Capability can be bought. Authority has to be conceded, usually by the one person who has never previously had to concede it.
That distinction is easy to lose in the language of professionalisation, which tends to treat capability and governance as the same journey travelled at the same speed. UBS’s Global Family Office Report 2026 offers reason to think they are not.
Where the money goes, and where the structure does not
Personnel costs at surveyed family offices typically account for 60% to 70% of total operating expenses. That single figure disposes of any lingering picture of the family office as a principal and a bookkeeper. These are staffed organisations carrying the fixed costs of real infrastructure, drawn from 307 single-family offices across more than 30 markets, with an average respondent net worth of $2.7 billion and average family-office assets under management of $1.3 billion.
Set the payroll figure against three others from the same survey. Only around a third of those offices had a formal succession plan for the family office itself, as distinct from succession within the family. Just over a quarter had an organised process for preparing the next generation to take on governance responsibility. Fewer than one in three had a formal process for selecting and reviewing the external providers — managers, administrators, advisers — on which they depend.
Individually, none of these findings would carry much weight. Placed beside a payroll that consumes two-thirds of operating cost, they describe something more specific: substantial investment in what the office can do, and considerably less in the structures that determine how what it does gets authorised, reviewed and continued.
Values are not a system
Antonio Risorto, Head of Wealth Planning for Europe at Deutsche Bank Private Bank, treats this as an architectural failure rather than a failure of intent. Family offices, in his account, accumulate governance in fragments — an investment mandate here, an informal understanding there — without ever assembling the pieces into something that functions as a system. “You’ve got to translate values into core principles, and then into the policy structure you need — almost like a government,” he says.
The comparison is deliberately unglamorous. Governments do not run on shared values; they run on the machinery that converts values into consistent decisions when circumstances are difficult and tempers are short. The family-office equivalent is an investment policy statement that constrains behaviour rather than describing it, documented decision rights specifying who can commit capital and at what threshold, and a committee with sufficient standing to question the family rather than only its managers. The UBS findings suggest it is precisely this middle layer where sophistication tends to stop.
The concession professionalisation does not require
There is a reason the middle layer lags, and it is not indifference. Hiring a credentialed CIO, building a reporting stack, formalising an investment process — each of these adds to what an office can do, and asks nobody to give anything up. Writing down decision rights is a different kind of act. It requires the person with the most authority today to specify how that authority will be constrained tomorrow, including for themselves.
For a founder who created the wealth and has always held the final word, that can feel less like maturity than like an admission that instinct has ceased to be sufficient. The instinct is not always wrong. Concentrated decision-making has served plenty of families extremely well, and the case for formality rests less on distrusting the founder than on the institution needing to function on a day when the founder is not there.
Filed, not consulted
“It’s vital that policies are not just filed away,” Risorto says. “They must inform the systems the family office implements.” The gap he is describing — between a policy that exists and a policy anybody consults — maps closely onto the succession-planning figures. Drafting a succession plan is the straightforward part. Testing it, revisiting it, amending it as the family and the office change: that is the work, and it leaves no artefact to point to.
Decision rights behave the same way. Most offices can describe informally who tends to make which calls. Far fewer have set it down in a form that survives any one person’s departure. The offices most exposed are rarely those with no structure at all; pure informality is self-correcting, because everyone knows the founder decides. The fragile position is partial formalisation — an investment committee whose authority relative to the principal has never been settled, a policy statement nobody has stress-tested against the first attractive investment that falls outside it.
The relationships nobody reviews
The provider-oversight figure deserves more attention than it usually receives. Every external relationship carries delegated authority, and delegated authority subject to no review process is, in operational terms, ungoverned. An office can hold an immaculate internal decision record and remain exposed through a manager relationship nobody has formally reassessed in a decade. Governance debate inside family offices has concentrated on who may approve what internally, while comparatively little structured attention has followed the external channels through which a great deal of capital and a great deal of risk actually move.
Structure as protection
Risorto frames governance as protective rather than restrictive, and the framing matters for how families receive it. “Reducing ambiguity around decision-making responsibility could help lessen the propensity for misunderstandings,” he says — a formulation aimed as much at family cohesion as at institutional credibility. Ambiguity is comfortable while everyone agrees. It becomes expensive at exactly the moment they stop.
Return, then, to the payroll. Two-thirds of operating cost now goes to people hired to run something that, in a third of cases, has no documented plan for continuing without them, and in most cases no formal process for reviewing the outside firms it relies upon. That is not a portrait of an unprofessional industry. It is a portrait of one that has invested heavily in competence and comparatively little in the arrangements that decide how competence is used. Whether the second follows the first is, on this evidence, still open.
"The offices most exposed here are rarely the ones with no structure at all. The fragile position is partial formalisation."
"You’ve got to translate values into core principles, and then into the policy structure you need — almost like a government."
Antonio Risorto, Head of Wealth Planning for Europe, Deutsche Bank Private Bank