Traditional wealth management treats data as a byproduct of investing: something you need for compliance and periodic reporting. The focus remains on the underlying assets: the stocks, bonds, property, and alternative investments that comprise your wealth. But this perspective misses a critical insight that leading consultancies and business schools have now quantified. High-quality, highly usable data is not just a record of assets; it is itself an asset that generates measurable financial returns.
The reason most wealthy families fail to capture this value is fragmentation. When assets are spread across multiple custodians, advisors, jurisdictions, and classes, the data often remains siloed. What should be a proprietary intelligence asset becomes a collection of disconnected reports. The question facing sophisticated wealth owners is straightforward: How do you transform this fragmented information into a performing asset with its own ROI?
Three Approaches to Valuing Your Data
Financial professionals value traditional assets through well-established frameworks. Real estate, businesses, and investment portfolios are assessed using cost, market, or income-based approaches. Research from Harvard Data Science Review demonstrates that data assets follow these same valuation frameworks. The researchers quoted the American Internal Revenue Service: “Just like physical assets, data can be valued based on its cost, its sale value, or its income potential.”
- Cost approach: Wealthy families might ask: What does it cost to create a consolidated view? For a family office managing wealth traditionally across five custodians, multiple jurisdictions, and 40+ asset types, the answer includes staff salaries for data reconciliation and the opportunity cost of senior professionals spending time on manual consolidation rather than strategic advice. Such costs are rarely parsed out but often represent significant labour expenses and missed strategic opportunities.
- Market approach: Consider what others pay for similar capabilities. Whilst your wealth data isn’t for sale, corporate acquisition multiples and technology valuations increasingly reflect the strategic value of proprietary data assets. Just look at the business headlines.
- Income approach: Most relevant for wealth owners. It focuses on the financial returns data assets enable. Deloitte’s 2025 research found that data monetisation strategy adoption expanded from 16% to 65% of organisations between 2023 and 2025, with 84% of those investing in data management reporting positive ROI. These figures reveal how industry leaders — many of whom you might be invested in — assess consolidated, high-quality information. It commands premium investment because it delivers premium returns.
This is where data transitions from being a cost centre to a performing asset. Think: What yield does this data generate? What alpha does it create? What risks does it mitigate?
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The 'Yield' of Data: Measurable Cost Savings and Performance Gains
Think of data quality and consolidation as generating “yield” through three channels: fee optimisation, tax efficiency, and time recapture.
- Fee transparency and optimisation represents the most immediate return. Research from Cambridge Associates shows that total wealth management costs for families range from 115 to 175 basis points annually. That’s a 60-basis-point spread that reflects complexity, negotiation leverage, and transparency. Without a consolidated view, families cannot benchmark fees across advisors or identify redundant services. With transparency, that 60-basis-point differential becomes actionable: on a CHF 100 million portfolio, closing this gap delivers CHF 600,000 in annual savings. Over a decade, this single benefit compounds to millions.
- Tax optimisation provides the second yield channel. JP Morgan Private Bank research documents that disciplined tax-loss harvesting strategies generate approximately 1–2% in additional annual after-tax returns. The key word is “disciplined”. Discipline requires a consolidated view of all holdings to coordinate harvesting across accounts without triggering wash sales. On a CHF 10 million taxable portfolio, this 1–2% tax alpha represents CHF 100,000–200,000 in additional annual returns. The strategy is impossible to execute properly when holdings are fragmented across multiple custodians that you and your advisors cannot see collectively.
- Time recapture is the third component, though harder to quantify precisely. Family office professionals often spend significant time each month on manual data consolidation, reconciliation, and report preparation. That time could be better spent on strategic asset allocation, next-generation education, or sourcing new investment opportunities. When automated consolidation platforms reduce this administrative burden, they’re redirecting high-cost professional capacity towards high-value activities.
Consider an example: A family with CHF 50 million in investable assets achieves 1% annual tax alpha through coordinated harvesting (CHF 500,000), reduces total fees by 25 basis points through transparency and negotiation (CHF 125,000), and recaptures 100 hours annually of a senior advisor’s time (valued at CHF 300 per hour, or CHF 30,000). The annual “yield” from their data asset: CHF 655,000. The cost of the enabling technology: a fraction of this amount. This scenario illustrates what treating data as a performing asset looks like in practice.
The "Alpha" of Data: Your Information Advantage
Beyond yield, consolidated wealth data creates alpha through information advantage. This concept is more sophisticated but no less measurable.
Not all your wealth stakeholders need to see your entire financial picture. For example, your private banker in Geneva doesn’t need to see your London real estate holdings. Some stakeholders — like you — do. But without consolidation, even wealth owners lack this comprehensive intelligence.
That intelligence is valuable. As research from MIT Sloan Management Review demonstrates, superior information quality translates directly into competitive advantage through better decision-making.
The investment industry has long understood this principle. The CFA Institute documents how alternative data — proprietary information not available through traditional financial statements — enables alpha generation not explained by traditional risk factors. Whilst CFA research focuses on institutional investors using satellite imagery or credit card data, the paradigm applies directly to family wealth: Your complete, consolidated portfolio view is alternative data that no one else possesses.
The alpha isn’t theoretical. It manifests, for example, when you spot a concentration risk before a sector correction. It appears when you identify that your estate planning strategy conflicts with your actual asset allocation. It emerges when you can answer the question “Do I have sufficient liquidity for upcoming private equity capital calls?” with confidence rather than approximation.
Calculating the ROI: Data as a Performing Asset
When you combine the yield components (fee savings, tax optimisation, time recapture) with the alpha benefits (better decisions, risk identification, strategic coordination), consolidated wealth data delivers returns that rival traditional investment returns.
Consider a conservative calculation for a family with CHF 100 million in investable assets:
- Fee optimisation: 50 basis points reduction through transparency = CHF 500,000 annually
- Tax alpha: 100 basis points from coordinated tax-loss harvesting = CHF 1,000,000 annually
- Risk mitigation: Value of avoiding one major concentration error over a decade = unquantified but substantial
- Time recapture: 200 hours annually of professional capacity redirected to strategic work = CHF 60,000+ in value
Total annual benefit: CHF 1,560,000 minimum, with significant upside from better strategic decisions.
The cost of achieving this result? Access to a technology platform that automates consolidation, validates data quality, and delivers actionable analytics typically costs a small fraction of these benefits. You don’t need to build it yourself; the software-as-a-service model brings costs down and can bring an outsized annual return on investment in data infrastructure.
The reframe is fundamental: Data quality and consolidation are not operational expenses to be minimised. They’re strategic investments with measurable ROI. Leading businesses increasingly treat data as balance-sheet assets requiring active management and capital allocation. Wealthy families should do the same.
From Static Records to Strategic Assets
For decades, wealth owners have accepted data fragmentation as an unavoidable complexity of sophisticated portfolios. Multiple custodians, international holdings, and diverse asset classes seemingly necessitated disconnected record-keeping and periodic manual reconciliation.
But treating consolidated data as a performing asset requires seeing it not just as a reporting convenience but also as a strategic asset worthy of investment and active management.
Purpose-built platforms that automate data consolidation, ensure quality through validation, and deliver actionable intelligence are enabling this transformation. They’re wealth performance multipliers.
The Altoo Wealth Platform was designed on this principle. With it, your automatically consolidated, analysed, and visualised wealth data becomes one of your highest-performing assets.
Your data is clearly an asset; make sure you’re managing it like one. Contact us to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform streamlines this process.
