Europe Family Office Investment Summit

The Europe Family Office Investment Summit is run by Alea Global Group and held over two days at the Palazzo Brancaccio in Rome. It is now in its sixth edition and gathers more than seventy of the region's family offices, along with service providers who want time with them.

Who attends

The summit draws family offices, private investors and what the organiser describes as the region's leading families, together with selected partners. Speakers are drawn from entrepreneurs, investors, government officials and wealth management professionals across Europe, the Middle East and further afield.

The Middle Eastern component is worth noting. Rome is closer to Gulf capital than most European conference cities in both geography and habit, and a summit that brings Gulf and European families together covers ground that a London or Zurich event usually does not.

Service providers attend openly. This is not a closed peer group, and the organiser does not present it as one.

How access works

Two conditions apply, and the organiser states both. Registration is subject to advisory board approval, and it requires payment of an attendance fee. So this is neither a free invitation nor an open ticket: you have to be approved and you have to pay.

Alea does not publish the fee on the summit site for any attendee category, so the figure has to come from the organiser. The advisory board approval step is the more useful of the two conditions from a family's point of view, since it means the room has been assembled rather than sold.

What attendees get

Two days spanning succession planning, real estate, private equity, wealth management, geopolitics, artificial intelligence, digital assets and investment in culture. The format mixes keynotes, panels and roundtables with substantial networking, and recent agendas have also carried sustainable investing, governance, venture capital and strategies for wealth across several generations.

The breadth is both the appeal and the caveat. An agenda that covers geopolitics and digital assets and cultural investment in two days will not go deep on any of them. What it does provide is a wide view for an office that wants to survey the field, in a room of seventy peers rather than several hundred.

The Rome setting and the palazzo venue are part of the proposition. Whether that matters is a matter of taste, but it does shape who chooses to attend.