Family Wealth Alliance

The Family Wealth Alliance describes itself as the only membership organisation focused exclusively on North American multifamily wealth firms. It has been publishing research on the sector since 2003 and is best known for that work rather than for its events.

Who joins

Membership is at firm level and covers advisory businesses: multi-family offices, outsourced chief investment officers, high-end wealth management firms, trust companies, the family office practices of law and accounting firms, and professionally managed single family offices.

The badge on this listing marks it as an advisers and professionals network, and the membership rule confirms it. This is an industry body for the firms that serve wealthy families, not a peer group that a family joins.

That still leaves a real use for a family office. If yours is professionally managed it can join in its own right, and the benchmarking research is aimed squarely at questions an office cannot answer alone: what comparable firms charge, how they are staffed, and what their economics look like.

How membership works

Membership is selective and the Alliance publishes no fee schedule, so terms come on enquiry.

One practical note. The web address recorded in earlier research pointed at a page that no longer exists; the organisation's main site is live and is the address given here. If you followed an old link and reached an error, that is why.

What members get

Research is the substance. The Alliance has produced more than twenty-five industry reports since 2003, including recurring studies on the economics of family wealth firms and on what clients actually think of the service they receive. It also established a set of multifamily office standards in 2005, at a time when the term meant almost anything.

Events are smaller in scale and built around peer discussion. Chief executive roundtables are grouped by the stage a firm has reached, which is a sensible piece of segmentation, since a founder-led firm of fifteen people and an established one with several hundred million in revenue share few problems. The Fall Forum is the main annual gathering, a Young Professionals Network runs workshops for people earlier in their careers, and quarterly webinars fill the calendar between.

For a family that engages a multi-family office, the practical value is indirect but real: the Alliance's studies are among the few sources on what these firms actually charge and how they operate, which is useful information to hold before negotiating.