AIFO: Associazione Italiana Family Officer

The Associazione Italiana Family Officer was founded in 2005 by Patrizia Misciattelli delle Ripe as a non-profit body, and describes itself as a meeting point for the professionals who manage and protect substantial family wealth in Italy. Together with its French counterpart AFFO it founded the International Federation of Family Offices.

Who joins

The membership is family officers and the professionals who serve wealthy Italian families, which the badge on this listing reflects. This is a professional body rather than a group families join.

That focus on the practitioner rather than the family is the point of the organisation. Its central project has been turning family officer from a job title anyone could adopt into something with a defined standard.

How membership works

Membership is by application against the association's professional criteria, and dues are not published.

The credential is what makes AIFO unusual in this directory. In June 2019 the association obtained official recognition from Italy's Ministry of Economic Development to certify family officers under Law 4/2013, the Italian statute covering professions that have no formal regulatory order. It issues attestations of service quality to family officers who meet the standard.

That is a rare thing. Family office work is unregulated almost everywhere, and the usual result is that the title carries no information. Italy now has a state-recognised body attesting to it, which gives an Italian family a way to check a practitioner's credentials that families elsewhere simply do not have.

What members get

Training is the substance. AIFO has run a Master in Family Office since 2015, and has added an advanced course for family lead advisers. Both are aimed at building the professional foundation the certification then attests to.

Around the training sit member meetings, networking events the association calls financial aperitifs, and relationships with comparable bodies abroad.

For an Italian family, the practical use of AIFO is not membership but verification: it is the place to check whether the person advising you holds a recognised attestation, and the training programmes tell you what a qualified family officer in Italy is expected to know. For a practitioner in the Italian market, the certification is the strongest argument for joining, since no equivalent exists in most European countries.