In The Know: Family Office Concierge Services

Requests To Move Beyond Traditional Wealth Management

Every family office’s core capability lies in managing large portfolios of private assets. By helping wealth owners reach their financial goals, a family office adds value primarily through satisfying their clients that their financial affairs are in perfect order. The key aim is to preserve and increase wealth. Everything revolves around figures, data, and facts. The focus is on business and financial issues, e.g. cash flow, optimising profitability and limiting risks and costs when investing in assets. Success is likewise defined in terms of achieving numerical performance thresholds. 

A track record of objective financial wins with a family office may, however, prompt wealth owners to look to the same family office for concierge or convenience services with rather more subjective goals regarding their personal lives.

In many ways, such requests can be natural and well-reasoned. Many wealth owners are – or at least think like – successful entrepreneurs. They look to free up their own resources by delegating responsibilities to committed, professional, and loyal associates. By achieving financial targets, successful family offices – especially those with a long-standing alliance with a wealth owner – have demonstrated that they are likely to be worthy of trust regarding other aspects of the wealth owner’s life.    

Trust, Loyalty, and Freedom

The typical wealth owner has a busy personal life full of time-consuming tasks that he or she may feel are unmanageable or simply not worthwhile in comparison to hobbies or leisure activities. 

Handing such tasks over to someone else has nothing to do with status symbolism, outdated aristocratic behaviour patterns, or any other aspects of the glamorous world of the ultra-wealthy that the press likes to portray. Rather, it is about trust and loyalty and the well-deserved freedom they can bring to a wealthy family.

When a family office takes on such responsibilities, it provides what are commonly referred to as concierge or convenience services that blur the boundaries of the traditional financial services world.

Recommendation: Allocate Family Office Resources Wisely

While often coming as a relief to family members, a family office’s agreement to take on certain tasks related to their private lives may not always lead to optimal results. Family office staff may not have the qualifications or know-how to handle certain highly-personalised requirements, and their attempts to do so may drain time and attention away from their fundamental responsibilities as wealth managers.

When considering a request to provide a particular type of concierge service, weigh up the costs and benefits of providing it yourself. There is a decent chance that an external service provider could handle it more effectively, more cost-efficiently, and at a higher standard. 

Recommendation: Digitally Streamline Your Core Business Processes before Providing Convenience Services

Your family office team members will be unlikely to have the time to properly provide convenience services if they are relying on manual work processes, archaic tools, and disconnected systems to handle your clients’ increasingly intricate financial affairs.

Partnership accounting, real estate asset management, cryptocurrency portfolio administration, and oversight of the values of collections of other collectibles, for example, are all immensely time-consuming when associated data must be duplicated and entered across multiple systems, reconciled, and consolidated for reporting and analysis in spreadsheets.

Modern technology able to improve the business processes behind such work is commonplace in many industries, but many family offices have been slow to adopt it. If you have been sitting on the sidelines in this respect, it is not time to think about providing concierge services. It is time to digitally button up your workflows. Otherwise, you will likely face long reporting delays, a high probability of data errors, having less time available to spend providing clients with the superior advice and counsel they expect above all else, and ultimately irate family members dissatisfied with what they perceive as your lack of transparency and your poor back-office operations.

The Altoo Wealth Management Platform is designed to meet the specific demands of ultra-high-net-worth families and their single family offices. Its revolutionary technology enables the family to have intuitive, data-driven views of their total holdings to better understand them and safeguard them for future generations.

It also provides on-demand insights regarding bankable and non-bankable assets, including alternative investments like NFTs and cryptocurrencies, and transparency regarding every aspect of a family’s wealth. Altoo has been named among Forbes’ top providers of family office management software for three years running. Rooted in the Swiss banking tradition, Altoo does the heavy lifting for single-family offices when it comes to wealth data consolidation and management, freeing up resources and helping single-family offices make strategic decisions based on accurate reporting in an easy-to-use dashboard.