Chicago Family Office & High Net Worth Conference

The Chicago Family Office & High Net Worth Conference is the Midwest event in the DC Finance conference series. It runs for a single day at the University Club of Chicago, and past editions go back to 2013, which makes it one of the longer-running family office meetings outside New York.

Who attends

DC Finance aims the conference at the high-net-worth community in the broad sense: family offices, family members, private investors and the professionals who work with them. It does not publish an eligibility test, an asset threshold or a cap on the number of places given to firms selling into the room.

That is worth knowing before you book. Screened forums keep providers to a fixed ratio and charge them for access. Open conferences like this one do not, so the room holds a wider mix. The trade is real in both directions: you meet fewer principals per hour than at a screened event, and you meet more advisers, managers and specialists than a closed peer group would ever let in.

How access works

Registration is open online through the conference site, which routes to DC Finance's central registration portal. The organiser does not publish ticket prices for the Chicago conference, and there is no published distinction between family office and provider rates. Ask the organiser directly for current terms.

What attendees get

The agenda covers a wide field in one day: financial markets, investments in real estate, technology and alternatives, estate planning, preparing the next generation, women's entrepreneurship and family business. Recent editions have also carried sessions on philanthropy and on the mental health side of holding significant wealth, which is less common on this circuit than the investment content.

For a Midwest family office, the case is straightforward. Most events aimed at this audience take place in New York, Miami, London or Singapore, and Chicago is the main regular option that does not require travel for families in the region. The one-day format also makes it easier to justify sending two or three people from a small office than a two-day forum elsewhere would.

DC Finance runs the same format in Dallas, Houston, Miami, New York and London, so families who like the approach can pick the edition nearest to them or use several across the year.