As a family office, you are a unique organisation – one with many inherent advantages when responding to challenges of an increasingly complex global environment. However, if you expect to grow and preserve your family legacy over the long term, you should consider adopting a new mindset and changing the way you operate. We have identified the key areas you will need to consider when building or re-imagining your family office. We call these the four cornerstones of your future-ready family office.
The four cornerstones provide the insight to develop innovative tools and services to ensure two key results. First, your family office is “built around you”. Second, your family office is future-ready and resilient to shock – enabling you to seize opportunities, manage risks, create meaningful impact and protect your family legacy – now and into the future. Let's reimagine your family office.
Renew your licence to operate while building your legacy
The challenge
Your family office business can generate better returns, manage risks successfully, build trust and become truly shock-resilient by adopting an active approach that turns your family values into its most valuable assets, focused on achieving total impact. What’s more, past approaches that target the management of family dynamics and growing wealth as a family office can become dated. To stay relevant, family offices need to redefine their role and renew their licence to exist and operate as your purpose and embedded values become a business imperative for true impact.
Codifying your family’s values and purpose will ensure they are properly understood and embraced by all. To be successful in this effort, your values and purpose should inform every decision and aspect of your family office. Not only will it guide your investment strategy for better returns, it will have a positive effect on the beneficiaries as well as wider society and environment.
Our response
PwC’s multi-disciplinary family office advisors have extensive experience in helping family offices and wealth holders bring their values to life. Our support ranges from codifying family values and embedding them in every decision, to advising on sustainable investments, impact investing, impact measurement, philanthropy and much more. All of this ultimately helps family offices to renew their licence to operate and to deliver on their purpose.
Seize opportunities and manage complexity as well as the unexpected
The challenge
In today’s rapidly changing environment, your family office is under increasing pressure to make decisions in a fast and agile way. This is vital if you’re to manage increasing complexity and responses to unexpected events while having the ability to seize opportunities.
Having the right governance and management structures enables nimble decision-making. For your decisions to be effective you need access to relevant, reliable and timely data – as well as having the processes and tools in place to analyse, present and use the data in value-creating ways. This means that managing the family portfolio becomes significantly more complex. Your strategies must include the right operating model, tools and mapping for the right route to digital transformation.
Our response
The innovative and responsive solutions we have developed will help you structure your family office to be agile, transparent and effective – while also future-proofing it through digital transformation powered by specifically designed technology for family offices. We can help by identifying and designing the most effective technology solution to provide easy and seamless access to data while enabling you to store, organise and interpret all your information around your wealth, communicate effectively and enjoy peace of mind knowing your data is safe and secure.
What does “great” look like tomorrow?
The challenge
As leading practices continue to evolve, we know that they can only be considered “best” for a finite period and what’s best in class keeps moving forward. Against this background, leading practices can be applied in a host of areas, including, but not limited to governance, location, investment strategies, business models as well as recruitment and retention. Family offices need to understand how to harness and capitalise on current leading practice in these areas and be able to access up-to-the-minute advice on what “good” looks like in all areas and functions to ensure maximum efficiency.
Our response
We can show you how leading practices apply to you and how they can bring you the power of our global family office experiences. Equipped with this knowledge, our multi-disciplinary and multi-jurisdictional teams can support you in building your family office from the ground up or advise you on a specific area or need. We can show you what good looks like…today and tomorrow.
Managing risks to protect your legacy
The challenge
We are all now living and working in volatile, uncertain and fast-moving times. So, now more than ever, your family office needs to prioritise all aspects of safety and risk management, including the strategies to follow and the tools to use.
The risk universe is becoming ever more complex.Your approach to safety and risk management should be holistic in nature. The levels of risk that your family office is exposed to are rising every day. You’ll need to be ready to navigate complex risk scenarios that go far beyond the traditional investment and operational issues. Disciplines include digital transformation, technology advancements, cyber security, reputation, climate change, privacy, transparency, personal safety, compliance and succession.
Our response
Backed by the wide-ranging resources and expertise of the global PwC network, our family office teams can bring you support from many of the world’s foremost advisers and thought leaders on cybersecurity, data protection, privacy and transparency. We also give you access to world-leading capabilities and intelligence to keep your business safe and secure, ranging from regulatory compliance to ethical practices to risk management strategy and support across all risk types.
Our holistic service offerings are built to meet the challenges set in the 4 cornerstones to grow and protect your legacy. Setting up your family office starts with defining the vision for your office and purpose for the family and its wealth. Once we understand the purpose and needs of the office, we help you build on this foundation to design each of the components to seamlessly support your family’s legacy.
We conduct an extensive review through research and interviews to understand past, current and future vision. We help you create an overall plan that encompasses key areas, including operations, technology, staffing needs, advisers and governance that is truly built around you. Regardless of the size, type or complexity of your organisation, we help you build the structure that best serves you to be future-proof and shock-resilient.
The thought of setting up a family office could be a daunting one but doesn’t need to be. Our 4 steps guide to build your family office will provide you with a comprehensive yet easy to navigate document that breaks down the process for easier understanding. It is aimed at building your confidence in undertaking the process and our global network of experts are here to help.
Creating a successful family office requires strategic planning and design. With decades of experience, we can prepare you for each step of the way –from assessment and vision to work plans and implementation. Together, we can help you design a strategy to manage the complexity that comes with a family-owned business.
Is your family office ready for tomorrow?
For those with an established family office we employ the PwC family office Diagnostic Tool, a proprietary web-based framework that provides an intuitive analysis of the services, processes, and risks contained within a family office.
Our benchmarking tool is built around the 8 core frameworks identified in PwC’s family office Services and comprises over 200 questions based on best practices for successful family offices. The framework provides a clear outcome for our multi-disciplinary and international teams to design the services you need.
Our drive to support your family office to be future-ready and to meet the digital challenges is outlined in our 4 cornerstones. PwC has partnered up with leading technology developers to provide integrated family office solutions for high net worth families to fully support all your family’s data, reporting and analysis needs.
The leading solution within our Digital family office offering is Wealth Compass, a family wealth portal designed for high and ultra-high net worth families, single-family offices, multi-family offices, trust companies and wealth managers. Our advisers will work with you and your family office to implement Wealth Compass. Wealth Compass is an innovative managed service that provides better visibility into your portfolio, performance and potential risk exposures as well as an automated and efficient back office, so you can focus on strategic decision-making, instead of transaction processing and data management.
PwC global family office network
We are one of the world’s most extensive networks of multi-disciplinary teams at the cutting edge of professional service for family offices.
With more than 160 years of experience and 5,000 people dedicated to serving family offices and wealth holders across all our lines of service and geographies, we can help you set up your family office or help you strengthen its foundations with our 4 cornerstones approach, family office diagnostic and holistic service offering.
Global family office roundtables
Our global and local roundtables and retreats are exclusive gatherings of family office principals. Our events offer networking opportunities in a private and relaxed setting, drawing on the collective experience of the participants, the hosts and PwC expertise. Attendance at these events is by invitation only. Contact us to find out when the next one will take place.
Jonathan Flack
Global Family Business and Family Office Leader & US Family Enterprises Leader, PwC United States
