Pioneered by the Rockefellers, single-family offices have always been the preferred choice for affluent families as a centralised means of managing their wealth. Single family offices constitute a dedicated team of personnel, handpicked by the family itself, that can plan, structure, and execute their specific wealth management needs. Apart from investment planning and execution, they also offer services like tax regulation and compliance, real estate investing, accounting and reporting, and other concierge services.
The key issue with the single family office model lies in its astronomically high operational expenses which could even reach up to a certain per cent of the family’s annual net worth. The multi-family office model solves this by pooling resources and distributing operational costs among all its clients. This allows multi-family offices to capitalise on economies of scale and provide a more diverse, scalable, and uninterrupted range of services by allocating larger sums to acquire state-of-the-art infrastructure and develop the very best research and wealth experts that the industry has to offer.
A single family office vs a multi-family office: How they compare
As the responsibility of family wealth shifts to the new generation, the inheritance is often divided into smaller, fractional interests to make the transition easier.
