Family Office Symposium at the Asian Financial Forum

The Family Office Symposium is a specialist session held alongside the Asian Financial Forum, Hong Kong's largest annual financial gathering. It is organised jointly by the Private Wealth Management Association, the industry body for Hong Kong private banks and wealth managers, and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the government-backed body that promotes the city's trade and finance sector. Recent editions have drawn more than 130 attendees.

Who attends

The room holds family offices, private wealth leaders, investors and professionals from across the surrounding ecosystem. Because the two organisers are an industry association and a government promotion body rather than a commercial conference company, the composition leans toward institutions and policy alongside families.

That should shape expectations. This is not a peer forum for principals, and it is not primarily an investment meeting. It is a policy and positioning event, and its recurring theme, that Hong Kong is the right base for a family office, tells you what it is for.

How access works

Access is by invitation. PWMA does not run open registration for the symposium and publishes no fee for it.

The relationship with the wider Asian Financial Forum is worth understanding. The forum itself is a large ticketed conference with its own pass categories, and the symposium sits within that week. Whether a forum pass admits you to the symposium is not stated on the PWMA page, so anyone planning around it should confirm with PWMA or HKTDC rather than assume a forum ticket is enough.

What attendees get

The published agendas have covered Hong Kong's competitive position for family offices, the practical steps of establishing there, and investment areas the organisers want to highlight: digital assets, climate and energy, sports technology, gaming technology, blockchain and impact investing.

The value depends entirely on what you want. For a family already committed to Hong Kong, or actively comparing it with Singapore and Dubai, a symposium run by the regulator-adjacent association and the government's own promotion body is the most direct route to the people who set and administer the rules. For a family with no interest in a Hong Kong base, the content is promotional and there are better uses of the time.

Attending also puts you inside the Asian Financial Forum week, when a large share of the region's capital markets community is in the city.