The Modern Family Office

Editor's Introduction

Building the Modern Family Office

Institutions can be built without becoming institutional in the wrong sense. This edition asks what that distinction actually requires.

Mr Okechukwu Kalu, Editor-in-Chief

Cover Story

Family Office Voices

Opportunity, Change and Lasting Beyond Three Generations

Ian Morley has spent two decades running a family office and rather longer watching other people's money. His answers are short, and mostly concern what he expects to be true in twenty years rather than what is fashionable now.

Ian Morley · Chairman, Wentworth Hall Family Office

Governance

The Institutional Family Office

Family offices are hiring, reporting and investing more like institutions than they did a decade ago. The governance layer meant to sit above all of it has, on the evidence, grown far more slowly.

James Taylor

Governance

Beyond the Balance Sheet

Nearly half of family offices still lack a functioning investment committee, even as their remit visibly expands into education, identity and next-generation development.

James Taylor

Succession

Succession Is an Organisational Challenge — Not Just a Family One

Half of family offices have no succession plan for their own executive leadership, a separate question from whoever inherits within the family. Most succession planning still treats the two as one problem.

James Taylor

Operations

Build, Buy or Outsource?

For the second year running, family offices in North America named the same technology problem as their top concern. The persistence of that finding says more about how offices decide what to keep in-house than about the technology itself.

James Taylor

Operations

The Rising Cost of Institutional Quality

Offices above $1 billion in assets now spend an average of $6.6 million a year simply to operate. That number matters less on its own than what it is actually being spent on.

James Taylor

Leadership & Continuity

The New Family Office Professional

Multi-location family offices have grown from 30% to 44% of the market in two years. The question this raises is less about hiring and more about what kind of professional can operate inside a more institutional structure without losing the judgement a family office still needs.

James Taylor

Technology & Data

AI Inside the Family Office

Family offices have almost every structural reason to be early adopters of AI, and are not. Understanding why is more instructive than the adoption statistics themselves.

James Taylor

Technology & Data

From Spreadsheets to Infrastructure

More than four in ten family offices are now developing a technology strategy. Nearly three-quarters still describe themselves as underinvested in the operational technology that strategy is meant to deliver.

James Taylor

Cybersecurity & Risk

The Vulnerable Family Office

43% of family offices have been attacked in the past two years. Fewer than three in ten believe they have a response plan they could actually rely on. The distance between those two figures is a governance problem before it is a technology one.

James Taylor