The Family Office Association (TFOA)

The Family Office Association was founded in 2007 by Marc J. Sharpe and connects principals and senior professionals of single family offices. Nearly two decades in, it has one of the strictest definitions of who counts as a single family office in this directory, and one of the clearest statements about what it will not do with its members.

Note the name carefully. This is a different organisation from the similarly named Family Office Association, which also appears in this directory. Check the web address before applying.

Who joins

Three tests decide eligibility, and all three have to be met. The capital must come from a single source with no outside investors. The staff must be employees serving that family alone. And the office must be a separate legal entity with no products or services to sell.

That third condition is the one that does the work. It excludes the multi-family offices, advisory firms and asset managers that fill most family office networks, because such firms by definition have something to sell. Members typically run assets in the hundreds of millions or billions.

How membership works

Applicants complete a membership form. TFOA asks for team size and assets under management, states that the information is held in strict confidence and used only to verify eligibility, and notes that a reference from an existing member family helps.

Membership terms are not published, so the cost comes on application. The organisation's own commercial policy is published, and it is unusually direct: members are not marketed to, member information is never shared, and there is no monetising of members. A strict code of conduct covers privacy, confidentiality and non-solicitation.

Read that as the core of the offer rather than as boilerplate. Most family office networks are funded by giving someone paid access to the members. TFOA states that it does not, which necessarily means members fund it themselves.

What members get

Private peer discussion, small-group events, educational programming and publications, pooled due diligence and co-investment opportunities, and access to the annual Single Family Office Symposium, which is closed to outsiders.

Pooled diligence is worth singling out. Several offices examining the same opportunity and sharing what they find spreads a cost that each would otherwise carry alone, and it only works in a group where nobody is selling the deal. The symposium runs a separate virtual track that service providers may attend, which keeps them away from the room itself.