Family Office Winter Forum (Opal Group)

The Family Office Winter Forum is Opal Group's one-day New York event, held each March at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The 2026 edition took place on 10 March. Third-party listings show it running since at least 2016, though the organiser does not number the editions. It is the compact city version of the format Opal runs over three days in Newport each July.

Who attends

The organiser claims more than 500 family offices, managers and investors, and lists the mix openly: family offices, endowments, foundations, consultants, attorneys, financial, estate and tax planners, accountants, philanthropy specialists, wealth managers, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital and academics. That is a wide room, and a family office should read it as such: plenty of peers, and plenty of people who would like a meeting.

For a New York-based office the appeal is practical. One day in Midtown costs little in time, and the March slot comes early enough in the year to shape allocation conversations.

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$2,895. End investors, meaning family offices, endowments and foundations investing their own money rather than selling to others, attend at no charge subject to verification. Opal reserves the right to re-verify past delegates, so a free pass one year does not carry forward automatically.

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

What attendees get

A single day of dialogue-driven panels, fireside chats and keynotes across investment strategy, private markets, direct and co-investment, family governance and the running of a family office, with networking through the breaks and a closing reception. Sessions are led by consultants and family offices rather than by sponsors, which is Opal's answer to the sales problem in a room this mixed.

The Winter Forum works best as a low-cost first look at Opal's series before committing three days to Newport in July or to the West Coast forum in Napa in October. For a qualifying family office in the city, a free day among 500 people in the field is a reasonable use of a Tuesday; for a provider, US$2,895 is the published price of that access.