London Business School Family Office Conference

The Family Office Conference is run by London Business School's Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital and held over two days on the school's campus beside Regent's Park. Being hosted by a business school rather than a conference company changes both who is in the room and what gets said in it.

Who attends

The admitted categories are narrow and published: family members, single family office principals, and senior single family office leadership, meaning chief executives, chief financial officers and chief operating officers.

The exclusions matter more. London Business School does not admit commercial service providers, and does not admit multi-family offices. The school states the reason plainly: sessions are held in a confidential setting without interference from service providers.

Very few events in this directory draw that line, and fewer still publish it. Most fund themselves from sponsorship and cannot afford to. A school with an endowment and a research mission can, which is the structural reason this conference can promise something the commercial circuit cannot.

How access works

Registration is by application. You express interest through a form, the school reviews eligibility, and invitations go to those who qualify. There is no route in for a firm that sells to families, whatever it is willing to pay.

The ticket is £995, with a 10% discount for London Business School students and alumni. Set against the two or three thousand pounds that comparable commercial conferences charge providers, and against the fact that families are the only paying audience here, that is modest.

What attendees get

Keynotes, panels and facilitated roundtables led by London Business School faculty, who present their own research alongside practitioner sessions. Recent programmes have covered succession, cybersecurity and digital risk, leadership transitions, sustainability, philanthropy and investment strategy.

The academic input is the differentiator. Conference panels tend to produce anecdote, since each speaker can only describe their own office. Faculty research describes what happens across many offices, which is what you need when deciding whether your own arrangement is normal or unusual.

The facilitated roundtables are where the exclusion policy pays off. In a room with no one selling anything, families discuss what is actually going wrong rather than presenting a tidy version of themselves. For a UK or European single family office, this is one of the few events where that is a reasonable expectation rather than a hope.