Family Office Association Hong Kong (FOAHK)

The Family Office Association Hong Kong was established in November 2020 and calls itself the voice of the family office industry in Hong Kong and the largest family office community in Asia. It is an independent trade body, which distinguishes it from the government-backed FamilyOfficeHK team that also serves the territory.

Who joins

One thing about the composition is worth knowing before you join, because it shapes the room. The association's own membership reporting has put multi-family offices at around four in five members, with single family offices making up the rest.

That is a professional membership more than a principals' club. Multi-family offices are businesses serving many client families, so most members are, in the commercial sense, firms rather than families. An office joining expecting a peer group of principals should adjust its expectations.

Members are registered or located across Hong Kong, mainland China, Southeast Asia and Europe, so the reach extends past the territory.

How membership works

Membership is paid and by application, with a pre-qualification step whose criteria are not published. No dues are published either, so both the test and the price come from the association directly.

Ask for current membership numbers while you are at it. FOAHK has not published a membership or asset figure for several years, so any total you find quoted elsewhere is likely to be well out of date.

What members get

Policy dialogue is the substance. Hong Kong has spent recent years actively competing for family office business through tax concessions and residence schemes, and an independent trade association gives members a collective voice in how those rules develop, separate from the government's own promotion effort.

Beyond that sit seminars and events on subjects such as family office structuring and venture investment in healthcare, a member directory, and a research output the association publishes as Family Office Intelligence. It also runs case competitions and internship programmes, which is an unusual line of activity aimed at bringing talent into the sector.

For a family office in Hong Kong, the sensible approach is to treat FOAHK and the government's FamilyOfficeHK team as complementary: one is the industry's own voice, the other is the jurisdiction selling itself.