Family Office Best Practices

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Family Office Reporting Best Practices
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This white paper examines the need for family office reporting and types of reporting, the challenges in providing such reporting, how to design a reporting framework, the effects of the recent financial crisis and impending securities legislation, typical versus best practice reporting, the role of technology, and outsourced reporting solutions.

A Best Practice Guide to Family Office Technology: Building the Operational Framework to Support your Firm’s Growth
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The increase in ultra-high net worth families around the world—especially in the emerging economies of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America—makes family offices a growing force in the global investment market. But if family offices are to live up to the high expectations of their client families, they must offer an exceptional level of service. To meet these service expectations, family offices need to have a sophisticated technology infrastructure in place.

Cloud Computing: What it is, How it Works, and Why You Should Care - A Primer for Investment Managers
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The cloud is the hottest buzzword in the technology industry right now. The whole subject of cloud computing, however, is often clouded — so to speak — by a lot of technical terminology and marketing hype. This white paper is an introduction to cloud computing written specifically for investment managers. It explains what cloud computing is, describes the different forms it comes in, identifies how it can be useful to investment managers, and maps out the most common concerns and pitfalls of moving to the cloud.

Empowering the Board to Evaluate Performance
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A challenge for many wealth owners is understanding how to assess the costs and value of the family office. This 2012 FOX Fall Forum session provided family members and family office executives a framework to determine and communicate seven critical issues managed through the family officeand featured highlights from the FOX 2012 family office benchmarking study.Some key takeaways:

Managing Art Wealth: A Guide for Family Offices
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A complete and well-developed art service platform can be a competitive advantage for a family office, and as competition increases these platforms will be more global, transparent and diverse in their offerings. Knowing these trends and changing your office to accommodate them can set a family office on solid ground with often demanding collecting families.

Art Storage: More than Just Art
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The term "art storage" is something of a misnomer as it is not solely focused on the storage of paintings and sculpture. Art storage applies to the safekeeping and preservation of a wide variety of property, everything from prints to jewelry to couture fashion to wine. This paper details seven crucial characteristics you should seek in an art storage provider.

Video Family Biographies: Bridging Generations and Preserving the Legacy
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Video biographies are an emerging instrument many ultra-high-net worth families are commissioning to help preserve their history. The biographies allow the wealth builders, or their progeny, to discuss, in their own words, important topics that are of concern to them – family governance issues, estate and tax strategy, philanthropic arrangements and the education and mentoring of their children and grandchildren. This paper examines in detail the merits of commissioning a video family biography to help protect and preserve the family legacy.

Succession Planning for Family Office Management
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As the baby boomers retire, many family office and multi-family office executives in key roles who have served the same clients for years will be leaving their roles. This change has significant implications for family members who lean on these leaders for insight and comprehensive knowledge of the family’s interests, advisors who look to them to coordinate services and the staff who rely on their leadership. In this 2012 FOX Fall Forum session, Jill Barber of CYMI, Ltd.

Generational Shift: Servicing the Millennials
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As family leadership transitions from one generation to the next, it’s not unusual for servicing needs to change to support the younger clients. Understanding the service requirements of different client life stages allows advisors and family office managers to adapt their service model to the needs of different generations, and reduce the risk of such shifts.

Helping Your Clients Evaluate a Multi-Family Office
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Just a couple of decades ago a fortune of $50 million was more than sufficient to justify directly employing a staff of accountants and investment managers to keep track of the family finances, including the holdings of various trusts and foundations. Today, the “break even” point is closer to $250 million and climbing. Hence, many former single-family offices have grown into multi-family offices (“MFOs”).