3 Signs You Should Revisit Your Family Office Tech Strategy

Evaluating Family Office Platforms for Specialty, Efficiency, and Connectivity

As a family office software provider, we talk about technology evaluations, well, a lot.

And when we talk about technology evaluations, it’s important to note that the conversation isn’t limited to prospective users and industry consultants trying to better understand our offering.

In fact, the most constant tech evaluation the team here at SEI Family Office Services participates in is the one we conduct ourselves: An ongoing assessment of how we can improve the Archway Platform^SM and the private wealth management operations it supports.

But if you aren’t a technology provider to hundreds of family offices and financial institutions, this may not be a routine activity for you, which likely has you asking the question, “When should I reevaluate my family office technology?”

Here are three signs that it may be time to revisit your family office tech strategy.

Your technology is designed for the masses, but not for family offices.

Out-of-the-box general ledger, portfolio management, and performance reporting solutions work extremely well for out-of-the-box scenarios—scenarios of which family offices rarely encounter.

Common pain points family offices may experience with non-specialized technology include:

• Entity consolidations
• Partnership accounting
• Nested ownership calculations
• Centralized disbursements and bill payment
• Enhanced investment analytics
• Complex, multi-pronged transactions
• Net worth and financial report creation

If your family office has found itself experiencing one of the above challenges, it may be a good time to research purpose-built family office solutions—or, at the very least, engage with a consultant that can point you in the right direction.

If your family office has found itself experiencing many of the above challenges, it’s an even better time.

Despite having a technology solution in place, you still predominately rely on manual processes.

Ideally, when you implement a technology platform, your family office will see a negative correlation in manual work: More automation, less human intervention.

But when the solution in place is non-specialized, or simply ill equipped to handle the nuances of ultra-high-net-worth wealth, family office professionals may find themselves doing a significant portion of work outside of the system. A few manual tasks here and there certainly isn’t enough to move the needle, but if you find that you are routinely performing manual rework in other applications, moving data to spreadsheets, writing physical checks, or building financial reports using presentation slides, it may be time to ask yourself if your current technology solution is serving its intended purpose—or if it’s just collecting digital dust.

Your current technology platform doesn’t connect with outside data providers or third-party systems.

Across industries, it’s generally accepted that technology silos can cause a variety of problems. Aside from clouding transparency and stunting collaboration, technology silos can prove to be a massive drain on efficiency. Often requiring duplicative data entry, technology silos at best waste resources, and at worst open the door to data discrepancies and risk across systems.

But technology silos and multiple systems don’t need to be synonymous. There can be immense value in selecting modern family office platforms that are able to communicate by securely passing relevant data to and from one another—whether through automated data feeds, APIs, or customizable data extracts and queries.

To that end, if your current family office tech stack lacks the ability to automatically collect data from multiple sources, integrate data across multiple systems, or produce comprehensive reporting, it may be worth reviewing the technology solutions that are preventing your family office from breaking down those verticals.

If your family office has seen the signs and is interested in revisiting your current tech stack, check out our simple wealthtech strategy evaluation to help you think through and build your organization’s long-term technology strategy.