Family offices are rapidly expanding their service offerings, with family engagement and education emerging as the most frequently added service since 2023. Behind this trend lies a complex reality: successful family engagement requires moving beyond traditional educational approaches to embrace active participation, address learning needs that extend beyond finance, and navigate the challenges of globally dispersed families.
Family offices often recruit talent from investment banks, private equity, and wealth management firms. Yet in family office settings these professionals may find themselves struggling with challenges less common in other areas of the finance industry: managing family dynamics, bridging knowledge gaps between generations, and balancing active business interests with investment portfolios. Advanced digital wealth platforms are emerging as a solution to help family office professionals succeed in this complex environment.
A gentle ripple has become a deliberate current. High-net-worth families anchored in Europe are quietly expanding their private wealth operations to hubs such as Dubai and Singapore. This is not a retreat from Switzerland, which remains a cornerstone of global fiduciary trust, but a strategic broadening. The map of wealth management is not being redrawn in opposition, it’s being layered with new centres. The motive is not unkindness to tradition, but a desire for jurisdictions that offer agility, clarity, and optionality. As one adviser put it to the Financial Times, family offices in Dubai “can be quieter. That’s more desirable
Inheriting wealth offers opportunity, but often at the cost of autonomy. Across Europe, a generation of heirs is forging entrepreneurial paths of their own, balancing the freedom to innovate with the burden of family expectations. Their challenge is delicate: create independent ventures that satisfy personal ambition, yet remain anchored in the family’s legacy. As one Swiss heir remarked to a UBS roundtable: “I wanted to build something of my own, but respected the foundation that brought me here.”
Deciding whether to establish a family office is often one of the most important choices wealthy families make. A wide range of factors shape this decision. In this article, we examine three of them by comparing four wealthy families and their approaches to managing their fortunes.
María Asunción Aramburuzabala formed family office Tresalia Capital after her father Pablo – executive vice president of Grupo Modelo, the brewer of Corona beer that his own father Felix founded after the Mexican Revolution – died unexpectedly of cancer in 1995 at age 63 with no finalized succession plan. Today she is worth an estimated $8.2 billion, making her Mexico’s wealthiest woman and Latin America’s second after Chilean mining magnate Iris Fontbana. Her story holds three valuable lessons for today’s family office builders.
Today’s family offices face two challenges that seem to work against each other: keeping talented staff and controlling costs. Recent industry research shows this phenomenon to be widespread. Simply paying higher salaries is not the answer. The way forward is to invest in modern technology that transforms how family offices operate.
For ultra-wealthy families, a family bank represents both a powerful conceptual framework and, in some cases, a formally structured approach to deploying capital. More than just a financial tool, family banking creates a foundation for fostering legacy that extends far beyond numbers on balance sheets. Here we explore this model, explain how it integrates with family office operations, and highlight key considerations that modern family office builders should understand when implementing this time-tested approach.

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