FOX Series

There has been a paradigm shift in family office technology.A decade ago, family offices had to custom build systems to meet their specific needs. It was expensive, cumbersome, and could quickly prove obsolete as the family’s needs grew and evolved. Even when cloud-based solutions first joined the c...

An impressive 79% of families say they have at least one family foundation. That's what we found in the 2014 FOX Family Office Benchmarking™ survey, our comprehensive biannual benchmarking study among single family offices. This 79% number is consistent with the 80% of families that reported ha...

The SEC has expanded the definition of “family” in single-family offices.The January 2015 ruling, which was an update to a previous SEC ruling we covered in the FOX Insights blog last year, affirmed that single-family offices not only have the right to also service family members’ in-laws and their ...

The SEC has expanded the definition of “family” in single-family offices.The January 2015 ruling, which was an update to a previous SEC ruling we covered in the FOX Insights blog last year, affirmed that single-family offices not only have the right to also service family members’ in-laws and their ...

When you think of Millennials, one of the first images that likely comes to mind is a group of young adults, all standing around in a circle... looking down at their smartphones. Unfortunately, this widely accepted vision of Millennials gives a false impression of how young adults prefer to communic...

Families change, grow and evolve from one generation to the next. So do family offices.While family offices are first formed to serve the needs of their founders, they eventually will shift in focus toward serving the founders' offspring and extended family—the next generation. A third-generation or...

Every January, we launch our annual Global Investment Survey to find out how FOX members fared in the markets, and what changes they’re planning for the year ahead. Members anxiously await these results so they can provide their clients and governing boards with critical peer perspective that helps ...

A third shoe has fallen. Family offices have now cleared three hurdles in the regulatory actions considered as a result of the Dodd-Frank repeal of the SEC’s old system for exempting family offices from regulation. The first was the ruling that family offices, meeting certain conditions,...

In September, the FOX Wealth Advisor Council convened in New York to discuss the latest FOX research, benchmarking and best practices for advisors serving single family offices. Many issues – from talent acquisition to profitability – were raised by Council members as key industry challenges. Perhap...

A frustration we often hear from families is that wealth management firms all sound the same. No firm can be all things to all families. The sooner in the process firms and families realize this, the better off everyone will be. For families seeking a wealth advisor, the question isn’t who is the "b...

From Kickstarter campaigns to Ice Bucket Challenges for charity, when it comes to raising funds in today’s hyper-digital world, online crowdfunding is generating attention from artists, media, non-profits and entrepreneurs alike. There’s no doubt it has proven successful for a variety of opportuniti...

In a very encouraging development, the SEC has indicated that they intend to grant exemptions from the strict definition of “family” in the Family Office Rule to allow family offices to serve relatives of spouses who are related through the marriage and not lineal descendents of the family’s founder...

A notable trend in recent years has been the increasing popularity of private family trust companies (PFTCs). This growth is rooted in multiple factors, but here are four of the biggest.IRS Notice 2008-63, a preliminary release outlining a structure to avoid adverse estate tax consequencesIn No...

The Private Wealth Management Survey is conducted annually by FOX and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and samples alumni of Chicago Booth’s Private Wealth Management course, a four-day program offered in downtown Chicago for high net worth individuals and families. This year’s stu...

The private family trust company (PFTC) has become a popular and useful vehicle to provide trust administration to ultra high net worth families. There are many issues to consider when deciding whether to create a PFTC. These include:JurisdictionMany states have enacted laws specifically desig...

Sometimes the greatest challenge for a family is to agree on how they will measure the “success” of the enterprise in each generation. The metrics of success should be tied to the current goals and priorities of the family, since they must be viewed in tandem. We can’t expect strong family leaders t...

As the family grows, both in number and wealth, it is critical to address the management of the family’s personal financial future with the same diligence that goes into managing the future of the business. So when should you separate and move your financial affairs away from the family business?&nbsp...

If any of the following situations are familiar to you, you probably have a family office embedded within your business.There is a department within the company referred to as “shareholder relations”Certain employees are dedicated solely to working with the family without other business-related respo...

In recent posts we’ve looked at what separates extraordinary wealth advice from the industry norm. Several industry leading advisors gathered with a select group of family office executives to tackle this issue at our most recent FOX Thought Leaders Council Summit. They concluded that state of...

Late last year several industry leading advisors gathered with a select group of family office executives for our annual FOX Thought Leaders Council Summit. They tackled an interesting question: What separates the best wealth advisors from the merely average? What they found was that high performanc...

The 2013 FOX Thought Leaders Council brought together representatives from sophisticated family offices and industry leading advisors with the goal of identifying the state of the art in private wealth management. They discovered that while on paper the services offered from one firm to the next are...

Recently key figures from leading advisors in the private wealth management industry gathered with executives from several sophisticated family offices for our annual FOX Thought Leaders Council Summit. The attendees met to discuss what constituted state of the art wealth management. What they deter...

Assigning a business executive to manage or coordinate personal financial or administrative affairs can be problematic for several reasons: Lack of alignment of interests between the business and the family – The personal goals and appetite for risk-taking of some owners may not align with the i...

Employers in the wealth management industry face two distinct talent challenges, one long-term and the other immediate. According to a recent Accenture report titled “The ‘Greater’ Wealth Transfer: Capitalizing on the Intergenerational Shift in Wealth,” Baby Boomers stand to pass on an estimated $30...

Business owning families face the simultaneous challenges of running a business while planning for the future of the family and the management of family capital. While successful businesses benefit from disciplined operations and strategic planning, the management of family wealth is often eclipsed b...

Every family enterprise needs a framework for holding together the disparate parts of the family activities, and a process for managing the elements in the framework. An integrated model of the Family Enterprise encompasses the family’s capital goals (in green), family governance and leadership issu...