The New Family Office Professional

For most of its history the family office was a room. One office, near the family, where the people who knew everything sat within earshot of each other. KPMG/Agreus Group’s 2025 Global Family Office Compensation Benchmark Report — 585 professionals across all roles and regions, plus 20 in-depth C-suite interviews — records 44% of family offices now operating across two or more locations, against 30% in 2023. Two years is a short period in which to dismantle a defining feature of the model.

Multi-location by drift, not design

Multi-location structures do not necessarily emerge from a formal expansion strategy. They can follow family members relocating, portfolios extending into new jurisdictions, or an office adding capability in another financial centre. Whatever the cause, the effect on the people running these offices is real. A role that once demanded deep familiarity with a single regulatory and tax environment increasingly requires coordinating across several, often with different reporting requirements and family members whose day-to-day context genuinely differs from one location to the next.

A second shift runs alongside the first: wealth preservation has overtaken wealth creation as the leading stated objective among the offices surveyed. Read together, these two findings point to a sector broadly prioritising the discipline of protecting and coordinating what has already been built over the pursuit of aggressive new growth — with direct implications for the skills an office actually needs from its senior people.

Depth is starting to matter more than breadth

Agreus’s own analysis, drawn from its work advising family offices directly, describes a hiring market that increasingly rewards specialist depth over generalist range. Where a single investment professional might once have covered public markets, private equity and real assets adequately, portfolios sophisticated enough to justify institutional-quality governance increasingly call for a dedicated specialist in each asset class, reporting into a CIO who coordinates across them rather than personally covering all of them. This is most visible in real estate and, increasingly, private credit and venture, where sourcing, underwriting and monitoring these positions has outgrown what a generalist can credibly manage alongside everything else on their desk. That said, the shift described in this research reads more accurately as increasing specialisation within a still-lean team than a wholesale replacement of generalist roles — the two are not quite the same claim, and it is worth keeping them separate.

There is an obvious tension here. Family offices, almost by definition, run lean teams; that leanness is part of the model’s appeal, and part of what keeps costs proportionate to what this issue examines elsewhere. A hiring market rewarding specialist depth pulls against a lean operating model. One response is to make that choice explicitly: which specialist capabilities genuinely need to sit inside the office permanently, and which can be accessed through outsourced or advisory relationships without adding permanent headcount.

What has happened to the COO role

Nowhere is the changing shape of the family office professional clearer than in how the COO role has evolved. Historically centred on operational oversight — coordinating financial processes, supporting governance, managing risk — the role has, per Agreus’s analysis, become increasingly central to governance implementation itself, sitting at the intersection of family principals, professional staff and a growing network of external advisers. As portfolios diversify across jurisdictions and strategies, the COO increasingly owns the job of translating strategy into operational reality: making sure investment committees, boards and family councils actually function, rather than simply exist on paper.

This expansion has produced a related structural pattern that recurs across the research: the hybrid CFO/COO mandate. Given the lean nature of many offices, it is now common for one senior leader to combine financial discipline — reporting, tax compliance, trust structures — with operational leadership and governance coordination. This works well where the two functions are genuinely complementary and the individual has the range to cover both. It becomes a structural risk in offices that have simply never revisited whether combining the roles still makes sense — a title unchanged even as the responsibilities underneath it have expanded well beyond what it was originally meant to cover.

Technical skill is table stakes now

Across the roles making up a typical senior team — CEO, CIO, COO and CFO — the common thread in Agreus’s analysis is that technical competence alone increasingly falls short. The CEO’s role reads less as direction-setting from the top and more as integration: keeping the family’s objectives, the leadership team and the organisation’s actual operations aligned. The CIO is judged less on investment technique alone than on the ability to translate between institutional investment discipline and family priorities, balancing return, risk, liquidity and values in a way a purely technical background does not automatically confer. The CFO’s role, often undervalued relative to the CIO’s, is where problems tend to surface late and at scale when the underlying financial discipline is weak — precisely because its output, clean reporting and reliable liquidity visibility, is only noticed when it is missing.

Structures that need revisiting, not just building

A recurring pattern in Agreus’s work, echoed in its own Family Office Maturity Model, is that leadership structures which made sense at an earlier stage — dual roles such as CEO/CIO or COO/CFO, or heavy principal involvement in day-to-day decisions — do not automatically remain fit for purpose as the office grows. Left unreviewed, flexibility that once served the office well can quietly become a source of concentration risk and decision bottlenecks, without anyone having consciously decided the structure should change. For offices facing this tension, the practical response is to treat leadership structure as something to reassess periodically against current complexity, not a decision made once at founding and left alone.

Why retention is a culture question first

It would be easy to read the competition for specialist talent purely as a compensation story: pay more, retain more. Agreus’s own experience with placed candidates suggests something more nuanced. The family offices that retain their strongest professionals tend to be honest, including with candidates during hiring, about what kind of environment they actually are — family-led or professionally managed, entrepreneurial or structured, closely involved or arm’s length — rather than presenting an idealised version that does not survive contact with the job. Values that live only in a handbook carry little weight against a culture that is visibly practised, or visibly is not, day to day.

The multi-location, increasingly specialist family office is not simply a bigger version of the single-location generalist office it is replacing. It requires people who can operate with real depth in a narrower domain while still functioning inside a small, high-trust team — a combination that is harder to hire for, and harder to retain, than either a pure specialist or a pure generalist role on its own.