According to the Campden Wealth/AlTi Tiedemann Global Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025, the most common services family offices began providing since 2023 centred around family engagement and education. This finding reflects a fundamental shift in how family offices view their role — moving from purely financial stewardship to becoming architects of family continuity and cohesion.
The research suggests this shift is not easy to navigate. Nearly half of family offices express concerns that heirs are underprepared for future responsibilities, yet over half lack formal engagement plans. Preparing heirs for these responsibilities involves more than financial literacy. Family offices’ top educational priority is defining the broader purpose of the family’s wealth beyond preservation and growth. Adding practical complexity, over half of wealthy families now have members living outside the jurisdiction where their family office is based.
Wealth Isn't Just About Numbers
Campden’s research revealed that 62% of family offices rank “purpose of family capital: beyond wealth preservation and growth” as their number one educational priority. Similarly, the 2024 Global Family Office Report from J.P. Morgan found that whilst 95% of family offices focus on financial asset management, many families struggle to articulate why their wealth exists beyond simple accumulation. The research showed that only one-third of family offices have fully developed plans for their wealth’s purpose, with another 50% acknowledging they’ve made only partial progress.
Given that defining wealth’s purpose requires deep family conversations and alignment, it is surprising that only 28% of the family offices surveyed by Campden ranked “money and relationships” as an educational priority after “financial fundamentals” (58%) and “leadership development” (45%).
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Recommendation: The data suggests that families should focus on building stronger relationships as a foundation for defining their wealth’s purpose. Greater family engagement will almost certainly follow.
When 25-year-olds ask “Why do we have this money?” and receive answers focused solely on preservation and growth, engagement will likely suffer. Conversely, families who can articulate broader purposes — whether supporting entrepreneurship, advancing social causes, or enabling individual flourishing — will likely find that heirs are more willing to participate in wealth stewardship.
From Passive to Participatory
Despite family engagement and education being the most frequently added service, 68% of family offices surveyed by Campden still lack formal engagement plans. Less than half have structured education plans. Satisfaction with next-generation education ranked among the lowest of all family office functions, with family members rating it at just 29% and non-family staff at 15%.
While many members of rising generations are being kept in the loop — 60% are invited to attend board meetings and 55% participate in multi-generational family gatherings — only 24% of family offices have forums where younger family members’ votes actually count in decisions.
This disconnect between attendance and influence suggests that traditional educational approaches aren’t meeting family needs.
Recommendation: The research points to an opportunity to treat education not as something done for the next generation but rather with them.
Consider shifting towards more experiential engagement. For example: Rather than simply delivering quarterly presentations about portfolio performance, create opportunities for next-generation family members to participate in investment decisions, governance discussions, and strategic planning. Younger family members may benefit from sitting on junior boards or family councils where they can practise decision-making with real (but perhaps initially small) stakes.
The Global Engagement Challenge
Modern wealthy families are increasingly international, with 57% of family offices surveyed by Campden reporting at least one family member residing outside their family office’s primary jurisdiction. European and Asia-Pacific family offices are significantly more likely than their North American counterparts to serve family members living in other jurisdictions (76% and 67% respectively, compared to 47%). Supporting these non-domiciled family members is a top priority for 85% of family offices, according to Campden.
Geographical dispersion creates significant challenges for family engagement. Campden found that 32% of family offices cite family dynamics impeded by cultural differences as a concern for non-resident members, whilst 23% struggle with family governance impeded by local legislation — especially in relation to investment, tax, and estate planning.
Recommendation: Strategically, be intentional about defining family culture and values — for example through documented frameworks that can survive in multiple countries.
Tactically, look beyond traditional approaches to engagement like annual family retreats and quarterly meetings that are obviously difficult to scale across continents.
Technology as the Foundation for Modern Family Engagement
These challenges — defining wealth’s purpose, active participation, and global coordination — all point toward the same solution: leveraging technology to transform how families connect with their wealth and each other.
For families aiming to define their wealth’s purpose, comprehensive wealth data aggregation and visualisation provides an essential foundation. While planning for future wealth use remains a valuable thought exercise, real-world purpose definition requires complete transparency about what the family actually owns. A modern digital platform that automatically aggregates and analyses wealth data across multiple jurisdictions and asset classes can create the transparency necessary for meaningful purpose discussions.
This transparency also supports the shift from passive education to active engagement. Rather than receiving static quarterly reports, family members can explore asset performance, monitor portfolio allocation, and track investment decisions in near real-time through web and mobile applications that work at the speed younger family members expect.
For globally dispersed families, secure digital communication tools enable the ongoing dialogue necessary for effective family governance across continents and time zones.
The convergence of these needs for transparency, interactivity, and secure global communications suggests that sophisticated digital wealth solutions like the Altoo Wealth Platform — which automatically pulls data from multiple sources across entire portfolios, presents results through intuitive dashboards, and features encrypted messaging — are becoming essential infrastructure for modern family offices committed to genuine multi-generational engagement.
For family offices ready to move beyond traditional approaches to education and engagement, exploring how the Altoo Wealth Platform can support these objectives represents a natural next step.
