When RBC and Campden Wealth surveyed 317 family offices in 2025, they found that manual processes and over-reliance on spreadsheets ranked as the most frequently cited operational risk. Manual data handling processes must be performed by people, of which family offices have relatively few. Goldman Sachs’ 2025 survey of 245 family offices found that 62% maintain investment teams of fewer than five members. These lean teams manage portfolios averaging USD 1.1 billion across public equities (31% allocation), private equity (21%), real estate, fixed income, and alternative assets. As family offices manage increasingly diversified portfolios, the data gap widens precisely where visibility matters most.
The Institutional Standard
Institutional asset managers have aimed to resolve the multi-custodian challenge through substantial technology investment and dedicated infrastructure. For example, State Street invests USD 2 billion annually in technology development focused on harmonising data across the portfolio valuation lifecycle (digitising administrative workflows and automating reconciliation processes).
Industry standards reinforce this approach. The CFA Institute’s Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) require composite construction and standardised performance calculation across all actual, discretionary, fee-paying portfolios. As of December 2023, 1,778 organisations claim GIPS compliance—a standard impossible to maintain without consolidated portfolio views. For institutional investors, real-time consolidation isn’t a competitive advantage; it’s a compliance requirement and operational necessity.
The Family Office Reality
Family offices face the same multi-custodian complexity as institutions but operate at dramatically different scales. The typical family office lacks the resources to replicate institutional infrastructure. With investment teams of fewer than five people managing billion-dollar portfolios, manual consolidation consumes resources that should focus on strategy and decision-making.
Wealth Aggregation: Simple, Dynamic, and Secure Beyond Compare. Discover the Altoo Wealth Platform!
Custodian infrastructure compounds this challenge. Many custodians operate on proprietary platforms that can be decades old. This compatibility gap often forces family offices to implement custody solutions as standalone systems, requiring manual reconciliation that introduces errors and delays. Where institutional investors negotiate enterprise integrations and direct data feeds, family offices typically lack the scale to demand similar accommodation.
The private markets allocation intensifies the data challenge. As family offices increase exposure to private equity, venture capital, and real assets, they encounter asset classes that resist standardisation. Capital calls arrive as PDF notices rather than structured data. Valuations update quarterly rather than daily. Performance metrics (IRR, TVPI, DPI) differ fundamentally from public market returns.
Professional Wealth Management’s 2025 research identifies cost and complexity of implementation as the primary barriers to technology adoption. Most platforms were built for hedge funds and institutional investors, leaving family offices struggling with slow onboarding, fragmented reporting, and lack of real-time insights. The institutional solutions exist but weren’t designed for the family office scale and complexity profile.
The Reconciliation Imperative
Portfolio consolidation delivers value only when the underlying data proves reliable. Manual reconciliation traditionally consumes significant resources at institutions and family offices alike.
State Street’s 2025 operational enhancements emphasise automated reconciliation as core to their value proposition. By consolidating providers and automating processes, the firm reduced operational costs and enhanced responsiveness to client needs. The automation accelerates existing workflows and fundamentally changes error patterns by eliminating the manual transcription, formula errors, and version control problems that almost come with spreadsheet-based approaches.
For family offices, reconciliation complexity multiplies with each additional custodian relationship. When statements arrive in different formats, currencies, and asset classification schemas, reconciling positions requires not just data entry but translation and normalisation. A USD-denominated equity position held at a US broker, a CHF-denominated bond at a Swiss bank, and a EUR-denominated private equity commitment at a Luxembourg fund administrator each report differently. Without automated reconciliation, family office staff manually verify that the same security isn’t double-counted, that cash movements balance across accounts, and that performance calculations use consistent pricing sources.
Technology as Infrastructure
The gap between institutional capabilities and family office operations reflects not a knowledge deficit but an infrastructure constraint. Institutional investors built or bought the technology that enables near real-time consolidation. Family offices need similar capabilities but do not have similar organisational scale.
Purpose-built technology platforms close this capability gap by delivering institutional-grade consolidation without institutional-scale investment. The optimal solution provides automated connectivity to thousands of custodians, normalises data across formats and currencies, supports both traditional and alternative assets, and maintains audit-quality reconciliation—all through interfaces designed for non-technical users. Rather than negotiating individual custodian integrations, family offices gain immediate access to pre-built connections. Rather than maintaining internal data normalisation teams, they leverage platforms that handle format translation automatically.
The transformation from fragmented visibility to consolidated intelligence enables a fundamentally different approach to portfolio management. When all positions update quickly and automatically, drift from strategic allocation targets becomes immediately apparent. When performance data aggregates across custodians, manager comparison and due diligence improve. When reconciliation happens automatically, family office teams redirect their focus from data administration to strategic decision-making.
The consolidation imperative stems from a simple reality: you cannot manage what you cannot see. Portfolio blindness — the inability to view complete holdings accurately — creates risk that cascades through every investment decision. Strategic allocation targets, rebalancing opportunities, and tax-loss harvesting potential are missed. Risk concentrations build invisibly. Each gap represents wealth preservation failure or opportunity cost that compounds over time.
The Altoo Wealth Platform addresses this consolidation challenge through connectivity to 3,500+ custodial and non-custodial institutions, supporting 40+ asset types from traditional equities and bonds to private equity, real estate, and collectibles. Automated data import and reconciliation eliminate manual entry errors whilst maintaining Swiss-hosted security and encryption standards. The platform’s visual dashboards provide real-time portfolio visibility that updates continuously rather than through month-end reconciliation, enabling family offices to manage wealth with institutional-grade intelligence at appropriate scale.
Contact us for a demonstration to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform transforms fragmented portfolio data into consolidated intelligence — with the same rigour you apply to every other aspect of wealth management.
