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.
To successfully help high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) preserve and grow their wealth, a family office (FO) requires more than expert asset management and financial planning skills. It also needs comprehensive visibility into all the family’s assets—both those the FO manages and those it does not. Open banking is here to help. This article explains how.
To boost the efficiency of the Swiss wealth management business and to strengthen Switzerland as a financial and innovation center are two main goals of the OpenWealth Association. The community of banks, wealth, and wealth managers was established in 2021 in Zurich to develop, define, maintain, and operationalize the Open API standard for the wealth management community.
Whether you’re looking for a net-new wealth management platform, or looking to make a change, customer satisfaction should always be a top priority. It’s important to make sure your wealth management platform provider can deliver both the technology and the service that you need.
If you’re using Excel spreadsheets for wealth management, you may have wondered about the value of a wealth management platform, and at what point it makes sense to investigate the options.
As a wealth manager, do your clients take your advice entirely at face value? If not, they probably have good reasons. After all, they most likely became wealthy by thinking analytically. You should not expect them to stop that analysis just because you are providing the answers. Fortunately, their difficult questions can hold immense value for both you and them. A sophisticated digital wealth platform can help you extract and unlock that value.
In today’s increasingly digitalised financial landscape, all forward-thinking wealth professionals face a shared set of challenges in consolidating, analysing, and visualising data as they monitor investments. For family officers in particular, these challenges involve three specific challenges. Here we suggest how you can successfully address them.
To keep up with constantly shifting traditional markets like real estate and equities as well as emerging asset classes like NFTs and cryptocurrencies, many family offices have recognised the importance of investing in their people’s targeted education. In this article, we list some of the best business school offerings designed to help family office executives skill up.
Philanthropy has always played a crucial role in shaping communities and driving positive change. As time rolls on, each generation’s philanthropic priorities and approach to giving evolve. Understanding these differences and bridging the gap between older and younger generations is crucial for nonprofits to grow their supporter base and drive meaningful change.
When wealth owners achieve financial success with their family office, they may seek additional support from it in improving other aspects of their personal lives. Here we explain why some wealth owners make such requests and provide two recommendations for family officers considering meeting them.
Projections of the value of the personal assets set to change hands during the so-called Great Wealth Transfer have risen from US $129 trillion from $72 trillion. More significantly, or perhaps alarmingly, are expectations that up to 88% of heirs to this wealth will fire or replace their parents’ financial advisors. How can you position yourself to keep serving the next generation of their clients? Read on for our top three recommendations.
Wealthy families and their advisors face the challenge of handling complex information from diverse sources, including investment managers, lawyers, and accountants. Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful ally, aiding in extracting valuable insights from this information overload and facilitating clear communication within family offices. Below we outline the top four family office use cases for AI and what to remember when embracing them.
Return on investment (ROI) is the profit earned on an investment divided by the cost of that investment. Although this calculation fails to directly account for the time value of money – an important consideration as some investments take longer to return profits than others – it offers a quick, useful way to estimate the future success of a given project. How can you apply this concept when evaluating potential investments into new technology? What factors should you bear in mind? Here we outline our suggestions.
As digitalisation reshapes the global economy, a trend of so-called crypto philanthropy has emerged. Involving cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, this innovative concept provides a borderless and bureaucracy-free alternative to traditional philanthropy and is poised to take on a powerful role in charitable giving.
For family offices, going paperless not only streamlines operations but also supports a more sustainable and efficient business model. Read on for our top tips on how your family office can digitalise to improve the way you manage finances and boost overall productivity.
Single and multi family offices are contending with more complexity than ever. For family officers and the families they assist, this article lays out the three main causes of this complexity and how the Altoo Wealth Platform simplifies them.
Wealth management firm leaders are always on the lookout for ways to save time, reduce costs, and make their processes more effective with new technologies. Their colleagues, however, are often reluctant to alter their familiar workflows. Read about the best ways to achieve firm-wide adoption of new digital solutions that can lead to success for the entire team.
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Family offices were built to endure, not to expand without limit. Their strength has always come from clarity: knowing how capital is structured, why decisions were made and who carries responsibility forward. For decades that clarity emerged naturally. Teams stayed small. Structures stayed understandable. Decisions remained close to memory. Today wealth is scaling faster than that inherited model can absorb, and complexity is accelerating beyond the reach of informal understanding. The real risk is not volatility. It is losing sight of the structure that holds everything together.
Most family offices believe they are preparing the next generation. The evidence suggests they are doing something considerably more modest: including heirs in governance without equipping them to participate in it. The distinction matters because presence and preparation are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where succession risk accumulates.
Family offices take measuring investment performance seriously. From benchmarks to fee tracking, the infrastructure for investment measurement is continuous, detailed, and increasingly automated. Apply that same question to governance — how effective is your board, your family council, your oversight function? — and the answer is different. The structures may exist, but the measurement often does not.
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The defining question in Swiss wealth management is not whether artificial intelligence will replace the advisor. The more important issue is whether the information environment is coherent enough for productivity gains to hold in practice. AI has attracted attention because it promises speed, efficiency and automation. The real test is whether information across banks, entities, asset classes and documents can be brought into a form that is visible, current and usable in day-to-day work.
