World Family Office Forum Europe

The World Family Office Forum Europe is a private two-day meeting for European business families and single family offices, run by Connect Group and held at the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace on Lake Geneva. It is now in its seventh year and sits alongside a matching Asian forum in Hong Kong.

Who attends

The forum convenes leading European business families and single family offices along with the advisers those families work with. No attendance figures are published, which fits how the event is run: it is a closed meeting rather than a conference competing on scale.

Advisers attend as part of the design, so this is not a principals-only room. What separates it from a larger conference is that commercial participation is not open to whoever wants to buy a place.

How access works

Attendance is by invitation. Anyone who has received a personal invitation is asked to reply to the person who approached them rather than registering online. Anyone else can write to Connect Group to express interest, but the organiser states that all attendance requests are assessed and depend on board approval.

There is no ticket to buy and no published price for any attendee category. That means the cost cannot be judged from the outside, and it also means there is no route in for a family with no existing connection other than to ask and be assessed.

What attendees get

Two days of roundtable discussions, keynote presentations, scheduled one-to-one meetings and evening receptions. The programme covers wealth management, investment strategy, family governance and sustainable finance, judging by the speakers each edition puts forward.

The one-to-one meetings are worth singling out. Small closed forums often leave connection to chance around the coffee; scheduling private meetings into the programme means an attendee can arrive with a list of people to see and leave having seen them.

Montreux is a deliberate choice of location. It puts the forum within reach of the Swiss private banking and family office centres of Geneva and Zurich while keeping attendees away from their offices for two days, which tends to produce better conversation than a city-centre venue does.