Family Office & Private Wealth Management Forum (Opal Group)

The Family Office & Private Wealth Management Forum is Opal Group's flagship family office event, held over three days each July at the Newport Harbor Island Resort in Rhode Island. The organiser calls it the largest family office event in the world and expects more than 1,000 delegates. It has run in Newport since at least 2014, and the summer date and sailing-town setting are part of its identity: the programme includes an annual Regatta Cup race alongside the sessions.

Who attends

The audience is wide by design: family offices, private investors, investment managers, and the accountants, attorneys, estate and financial planners, hedge funds, private equity firms and academics who work around them. Opal follows the industry pattern of putting principals and providers in the same room, and this forum is the biggest of those rooms.

Scale cuts both ways. A family office will find more peers here than at almost any other US event, and also more people selling. The organiser addresses that in the format rather than by capping providers: panels are led by consultants and family offices, and slide decks are limited to stand-alone educational speakers.

How access works

Registration is online, with the attendee type verified before a pass is issued. Managers and service providers pay a standard rate of US$3,495. Family offices verified as end investors, meaning they invest their own money rather than selling to others, and holding at least US$100 million, attend at no charge; complimentary registration closes a few days before the event and Opal reserves the right to re-verify past delegates.

That puts the forum between the open conferences, which check nothing, and the screened forums, which cap provider numbers. Opal checks who you are and charges accordingly, but does not publish a limit on how many providers may buy in.

What attendees get

Three days of dialogue-driven panels, fireside chats and keynotes across asset allocation, private markets, direct investing, governance, succession and the operations of a family office, with networking built into every break and evening. The July slot means many attendees combine it with time in Newport, and the resort setting keeps the group together outside the sessions.

Opal runs a smaller West Coast version in Napa each October and a one-day Winter Forum in New York each March, so a family office that likes the format can pick the edition nearest to it. For a qualifying family office within reach of New England, a free three-day pass to a verified room of this size is the easiest way to judge Opal's approach; for a provider, US$3,495 buys access to the largest room in the series.