How Consultants Can Help Family Offices

Explaining the Many Roles of Family Office Consultants

The role of family office consultants is far-reaching and the range and depth of the services they offer can vary significantly. From entity and organizational structuring to technology selections and operational support, consultants can wear quite a few hats throughout the lifecycle of a family office.

While SEI Family Office Services tends to interact with consultants most commonly during due diligence, selection, implementation and ongoing usage of the Archway Platform^SM, consultants can play a much larger role that expands well beyond family office software.

Broadly grouped into three primary areas of focus, here are a few examples of how family offices can work with consultants across their businesses.

Administrative Consulting

Largely focused on formative and strategic initiatives, family offices can partner with consultants to help with traditional administrative tasks such as:

• Family office creation
• Legal entity structuring
• Tax and estate planning
• Foundation and non-profit strategy
• Governance
• Next-gen and transition planning

Administrative consulting can also span to include niche consultancy like:

• Personal security and risk assessment
• Family education
• Legacy preservation
• Executive talent search
• Travel and household management

Administrative consulting can come in the form of a one-time project or as a recurring function as restructuring and intermittent evaluations are needed.

Technology Consulting

As a 20-year veteran in the family office software space, SEI Family Office Services has the most exposure in the technology-focused area of family office consulting. Over the years, we’ve worked with a number of consultants to help family offices on their technology journey.

Technology consulting projects can include:

• Technology needs and goals assessments
• Technology strategy planning
• Database infrastructure
• Family office technology selection
• Technology implementation project management
• Cybersecurity
• Client portal development and/or implementation

Though it’s common to associate technology consulting with the more familiar accounting and investment software solutions, it can also extend to the broader family office technology ecosystem, inclusive of hyper-targeted tools like digital family office communication apps, document managers, grant-making software, CRMs, dashboard-style portals and compliance platforms.

Consultants tend to have a large network of viable solutions that they are able to take to the table and recommend based on the unique needs of each family office. For this reason, technology consulting can be a very involved, but rewarding initiative for family offices.

Operational Consulting

This type of consulting lends itself more to ongoing service than one-off consulting efforts, but is nonetheless an important function of family office consultants.

Like administrative and technology consulting, operational consulting can include a variety of functions such as:

• Technology implementation project resourcing
• Software administration
• Accounting and investment data validation and reconciliation
• Monthly financial reporting
• Tax preparation
• Annual charitable gift planning

While not all consultants can perform the operational functions in-house, most are able to advise on a trusted service provider that will be a sound, long-term partner for the family office.

SEI Family Office Services has a long history of working with family office consultants across the globe. Schedule a call with a member of our team to learn more about our family office solutions and how we can work with your preferred consultant to support you from technology evaluation to ongoing usage of SEI’s Archway Platform.