Campden Family Alternative Investment Forum

The Family Alternative Investment Forum is Campden Wealth's investment-focused event series for families who put money to work outside listed markets. Campden runs it as a companion to its Family Office and Investment Forum: where that meeting takes the wide view of strategy and outlook, this one goes asset class by asset class through private equity, real estate, venture capital and beyond.

The series runs in several regions. The European edition is held in London and is now in its twenty-second year, which makes it the longest-running of them. Campden also holds a North American edition in San Francisco and an Indian edition in Mumbai.

Who attends

Places are limited to qualifying family principals, next-generation family members, family offices, family businesses and private investors. The audience Campden describes for this forum is more specific than for its general meetings: family members who take an active role in their office's investing, ultra-high-net-worth individuals and private investors, and the chief executives and chief investment officers of family offices.

Campden's qualification rule applies here as it does across its calendar. Applicants must be a family member or principal, an executive of a family or patrimonial business, an executive of a family foundation, or an executive of a family-controlled investment office. That office cannot be affiliated with a bank, a financial services firm or a corporation.

How access works

Campden Club members confirm their place with the events team. Everyone else completes the qualify form or arranges a call before a place is offered. Members of the Institute for Private Investors do not need the form.

Campden does not publish attendance fees for this forum in any region, and terms are given to qualifying applicants individually. Fund managers and advisers who want to reach this audience participate as corporate partners rather than as delegates, and that is arranged separately.

What attendees get

The stated purpose is wealth preservation and creation, taken together with the practical side of family stewardship. Agendas move across real estate, venture capital, private equity, luxury goods and collectibles, and opportunities in particular sectors. The recent European edition was built around how private capital funds new infrastructure, financial technology and healthcare.

For a family office already committed to private markets, the value is in comparing notes with other families making the same allocation decisions without a fund manager in the conversation. For one still deciding how far to go into alternatives, the forum is a reasonable way to hear how peers of a similar size have handled it.