Family Office and Private Wealth Asia Forum (Markets Group)

The Family Office and Private Wealth Asia Forum is Markets Group's Singapore event, now in its eighth year. Markets Group runs allocator-focused forums across asset classes and regions, and this is the Asian entry in its private wealth series. The organiser describes it as a gathering for top experts and institutional investors, and the agenda is built around alternative investments, protecting assets, market strategy and learning from other allocators.

Who attends

The room mixes family offices with wealth managers, institutional investors and the fund selection teams that sit inside both. Advisers and asset managers attend on the other side.

This is an allocator forum rather than a family office peer group. Families are a major part of the audience because Markets Group builds its events around who controls capital, but they sit alongside institutions doing the same job with different money. For an office that thinks of itself as an investor first, that is a feature rather than a drawback: pension funds and insurers ask sharper questions of managers than most family offices have the staff to ask.

How access works

Markets Group prices the two sides of the room openly, which is more than most organisers do. Qualified investors register at no charge, and the organiser asks anyone seeking a complimentary place to email its investor relations address to arrange it. Asset managers and service providers pay US$3,000.

The qualification step is what makes the free pass meaningful. A family office that manages its own capital and is not selling anything should expect to qualify. A multi-family office that markets services to other families is likely to be treated as a provider, and should budget accordingly.

What attendees get

A day in Singapore covering alternative investments, protecting family assets, strategy for the current market and structured peer-to-peer sessions. The value for an allocator is concentrated: a room where everyone else either allocates capital or is trying to attract it, and where the managers present have paid to be there.

For a family office in the region, the combination of no fee and a screened investor audience makes this straightforward to try. The honest caveat is that a forum funded by manager fees will always have a commercial current running through it. Markets Group makes no secret of the model, and the published US$3,000 figure is a fair signal of how much a manager is willing to pay for time with the people in the room. Read that as information about the event, not as a reason to avoid it.