Cybersecurity is a known and growing risk that all family offices need to address. The potential of a cybersecurity attack is no longer a matter of whether it will happen, it’s now a matter of when it will happen.
More family offices are embracing emerging technologies to optimize their operations and prepare for future opportunities; however, success hinges on establishing a clear future-state vision, documenting business requirements, assembling the right team of people, and implementing the right technology solutions at the right time. It’s a digital transformation that uses a holistic approach to encourage stakeholder engagement and bring operational efficiencies and lasting value to the organization.
Trusts are valuable tools frequently used to transfer wealth within families, preserve and protect wealth, and reduce taxes. Understanding trusts and the role of the trustee is important for the people establishing trusts and the beneficiaries of those trusts. Building on this foundation, answers are provided to some questions about trusts and trustees that a family’s younger generation of trust beneficiaries frequently ask.
The cyber landscape is always evolving and requires proactive diligence, effective controls, and regular education to significantly reduce the risks. While the volume and complexity of threats continue to grow, experts agree that businesses can significantly reduce their exposure—and costs, if a breach occurs—by following some well-vetted best practices. This list of such practices begins with setting a strong governance framework and is underpinned by continual awareness and education.
Families with significant resources are increasingly turning to formalized family offices to creatively deploy and manage their capital. As leaders of family-owned businesses look to unlock generational wealth stemming from a liquidity event, they might wonder whether a family office is the right next step—and if so, how such an office might work in practice.
People are critical to a family office’s long-term success. However, recruiting top talent continues to be a great challenge when there’s a shortage of top talent in a tight labor market. Compounding the problem, many family offices lack robust training and development plans to prepare next-generation family members and existing employees to step into key roles. As capability needs evolve, updating role descriptions for employee recruitment is key. Intentional skill development, career pathing, and creative compensation can help retain top talent.
In "How To Talk With Your Family About Wealth," we discussed the importance of the family conversation when it comes to planning a legacy—and how quickly wealth can be lost when these conversations don’t take place. Yet despite their importance, these discussions can still be difficult, especially if your family doesn’t regularly talk about money.
It is not uncommon for enterprising families to end up making sub-optimal capital allocation decisions due to limited visibility into, and planning around, the entirety of their shared family assets. To optimize the value of shared family capital, both the business and other entities or advisors in the enterprise ecosystem must work in harmony. With a well-defined shared family capital strategy and holistic framework, enterprising families will be in a better position to grow and sustain their wealth, promote family unity, and prepare for the road ahead with purpose.
As enterprising families expand across generations, they often stray from their entrepreneurial wealth creation roots to a more risk-averse wealth-protection mode. However, if maintaining shared family capital across multiple generations is the goal, wealth protection mode is not an ideal strategy and may have some unintended consequences.
For the wealth owners—and the family offices managing their assets—the opportunities that impact investing presents are arguably greater than for any other type of investor. While impact investing is a natural fit for family offices, most are still working out where to start—mulling over issues like how to source deals and measure impacts. In order to help them in this quest, we have captured the questions that family offices ask most frequently about impact investing and provided responses to create a thorough and accessible how-to guide on impact investing for family offices.