Essential Tech for the Modern Family Office: Tools for Collaboration, Planning, and Efficiency

Successful wealth management firms are often obsessed with efficiency, building and refining programs that enable each of their advisors to see more clients. But things are different for family offices, which traditionally focus on bringing highly tailored, holistic planning and concierge services to a smaller number of ultra-high net worth clients. This model has lent itself less to efficiency and scalability in favor of the kind of white-glove service that defies a one-size-fits-all system. But with recent advances in technology, including AI and new specialized tech platforms, today’s family offices can provide an even higher level of customized services with the kind of efficiency that was formerly out of reach.

The AI Advantage: Beyond ChatGPT

AI is enabling us mere mortals to do more than ever before in every industry, and it’s particularly promising for those in financial services. But AI isn’t a single tool–it’s a capability that’s built into many different tools–and so as decision makers in family offices evaluate which platforms to add to their tech stack. It’s vital they pay careful attention to if and how each technology employs AI. Is it a closed system trained on a specific data set, or an open system trained on the great expanse (and folly) of the internet? How does it handle sensitive data? Does it provide outputs that are truly beneficial, or are the results more like parlor tricks?

Finding a Balance with AI Communications

Client communications are sacrosanct with family offices. With fewer clients and more assets under management (AUM) at stake, each communication needs to be carefully crafted. That might make help from AI seem out of the question, but on the contrary – AI can be a great sidekick for these communications. For instance, you can easily create custom GPTs on ChatGPT with instructions for matching your firm’s tone of voice, and even train it on specific data. Then when you’re crafting a particularly sensitive email, you can give it simple instructions along with a few bullets and it will typically do a very nice job of creating the foundation of an email that you can then edit to your liking. But it’s vital, especially for advisors in family offices, to ensure these communications don’t feel like AI. Giving these communications a quick edit to add your human voice and perspective can make a big difference.

Family offices can take a step beyond ChatGPT, Gemini and other popular large language models (LLMs) by employing AI technology specific to the needs of advisors, like Jump, which automatically takes meeting notes, and Vanilla, which can organize and analyze estate plan documents into digestible visualizations.

AI Capabilities Embedded in Tech Platforms

The most forward-thinking software companies out there are incorporating AI into their products in all kinds of innovative ways. If you’re using technology that’s eschewing AI altogether, it may be a sign to look elsewhere. (With the caveat that AI needs to be carefully incorporated so as not to compromise sensitive data.) Platforms like Vanilla are using AI to help summarize and visualize complex estate documents and even allow advisors to ask questions they have about documents or plans. This kind of embedded AI can be a huge timesaver and can also help advisors prep for important meetings.

Tech that Gives You a Single Source of Truth

In family offices, managing clients with serious assets over multiple generations, planning can get extraordinarily complicated. There are important tax implications as well as estate planning considerations. In short, doing it right takes a team. But often that means multiple people trying to work together while pulling from their own siloed data sets.

Platforms that allow you to work with CPAs, attorneys, and other partners using a single source of truth for data can save time and ensure the work you do is accurate. The right estate planning platform is often the ideal data hub, as it will integrate with platforms like eMoney, Addepar, and Black Diamond, while expanding beyond those platforms to include elements of the estate plan (trust details, estate tax liability, etc.). And on a more basic level, it will allow you to have a single place where all of your pertinent legal documents can be digitally stored.

Visualize Multi-Generational Planning

Family offices are no stranger to multi-generational planning, but helping the next generation understand what is often a web of entities and financial strategies can be a challenge. Enlisting technology that takes complex trusts and financial instruments and automatically visualizes them with easy-to-understand graphs and flow charts can be enormously helpful. Visualizations make it easier to introduce key concepts of an estate to second and third generation clients and they can also serve as touchpoints in check-in meetings even after the concepts have been introduced.

In addition to edifying clients on current plans, the right tech can also help advisors collaborate with clients in real time, showing them various “what if” scenarios, so they can ensure they have the right plan in place to meet their goals.

Bespoke Planning Made Easier

The drive for efficiency too often waters down the kind of customization that makes many family offices great. But there is a way to achieve greater efficiency while simultaneously delivering superior service to clients. It’s all about choosing the right technology, those platforms that amplify the work you do, and that put powerful scenario planning and visualizations at your fingertips. It’s all about building a set of tech tools that helps you focus on the things that matter most while delivering exceptional value to your clients.