Family Office Outlook: Planning for the Future

A Look at 4 Key Areas of Strategic Focus Expected in 2023

As the end of the year looms near, so do project deadlines, final data reviews, and annual reporting deliverables. With family offices bogged down by the mechanics of reconciliations and closing the year-end books, strategic planning can unintentionally get pushed to the bottom of the pile.

But whether strategy is top of mind or not, the family office space is in flux—changing now more than ever—which warrants consideration of several key focus areas.

Outsourcing

Continuing a multi-year conversation, outsourcing has been a trending topic in the market for some time now. With more family offices reviewing internal operations and a growing appetite amongst financial institutions to offer a more holistic set of services to its ultra-high-net-worth clients, we at SEI Family Office Services believe outsourcing will continue to be the centerfold in the ongoing assessment of operations and resources.

Employed as a long-term strategy or as a trusted stopgap during unanticipated events, outsourced services can create meaningful capacity within family offices. Although family office outsourcing is often synonymous with professional services like tax and regulatory compliance or cybersecurity, it can also be impactful in core operational areas like data aggregation and reconciliation, partnership administration, and routine reporting.

Process automation

When the Archway Platform℠ was introduced in the early 2000s, it offered family offices the opportunity to automate the manual ticking and tying of prior decades. It offered automated data aggregation and the creation of financial statements and client reports. If offered automated partnership allocations, investment performance calculations, bill payment, and more. And all of this automation offered family offices something they’d long been after: Time.

Now 20 years later, countless technology solutions have been introduced to automate family office functions from A to Z, each offering a new layer of efficiency—and potentially adding hours back into the work week for family office professionals.

Enhanced analytics

Ultra-high-net-worth investors and next gen wealth owners are clamoring for data. They want more transparency, deeper insights, and a higher probability of success. For family office professionals, this translates into looking beyond traditional performance measurements and delivering enhanced analysis across a variety of metrics and results like attribution, benchmarking, value-at-risk, stress testing, exposure mapping, and what-if scenarios.

Is enhanced data analysis and reporting on your family office’s wish list? Check out SEI’s enhanced analytics and portfolio intelligence platform, SEI Novus.

Entity and tax restructuring

While most family offices don’t endeavor to restructure every single year, certain events can lead to this conversation taking a front row seat during annual strategic planning. Impending tax laws, new regulations, and political posturing can all lead to an evaluation of a family office’s structure. But so can major changes to the nuclear family like deaths, births, divorces, or marriages. As family offices and their tax attorneys consider tax advantages and implications, entity restructuring can help families weather the changes—political, social, environmental, or personal.

At SEI Family Office Services, we can’t overstate the importance of having the right family office software in place to manage the restructure, automate asset transfers, define new ownership, and validate the changes through reporting. With the help of the right tools, family offices can make the restructuring process feel nearly seamless—or at least as seamless as restructuring goes.

While it’s likely that your to-do list is long and the countdown to the New Year is short, we encourage family offices and advisors to high-net-worth clients to spend some time reviewing the outcomes of the past year and strategizing for the next.

To help open up the conversation in your own family office or with your high-net-worth clients, check out our guided family office strategy review checklist.