Wigmore Association

The Wigmore Association is an alliance of non-competing family offices founded in 2011. It describes itself as an association of firms passionate about collaboration and about sharing ideas and intelligence to benefit their client families.

One point to understand before anything else: this is a club of firms, not a network that an individual family joins. The members are multi-family offices, and the families they serve benefit indirectly through their own firm's membership.

Who belongs

Five firms make up the association, each in a different market: HQ Trust in Germany, Mutual Trust in Australia, Pitcairn in the United States, Promecap in Mexico and Turim in Brazil.

Setting them out geographically explains what non-competing means here. These firms serve families in five different countries across four continents, so none of them is pitching for the clients of another. That absence of rivalry is what makes genuine sharing possible. Two multi-family offices in the same city would never open their investment research to each other.

The structure also gives the association something a single firm cannot assemble: a view of how wealthy families are behaving in Germany, Australia, the United States, Mexico and Brazil at the same time, across very different economies, currencies and political conditions.

How membership works

Membership operates at firm level and is selective. The association publishes no criteria, no joining process and no fees, which is consistent with a group of five that grows by mutual agreement rather than by application.

For a family, the practical question is not how to join but whether your existing multi-family office belongs to something like this, and if not, what research and comparison it has access to instead.

What members get

The association points to thousands of hours of shared analysis of global financial performance across the full range of asset classes and leading fund managers, together with access to generations of first-hand experience across the member firms.

Investment manager diligence is expensive and largely duplicated across the industry. Five firms on four continents pooling that work spreads a cost that each would otherwise carry alone, and gives each of them sight of managers they would not have encountered in their own market.

For a family already served by one of the five, this is quietly one of the more valuable arrangements in this directory, because the benefit arrives in the quality of advice rather than in an invitation to an event. For everyone else it is worth knowing as a model, and as a reasonable question to put to your own adviser.