Expert Roundtable: Technology’s Challenges and Opportunities

Advances in technology can make family offices more efficient — but they can also raise difficult questions about costs. Three family office experts weigh in:

The family office generally serves a wide array of technology users that vary in their level of technical acumen. As more threat actors are focusing on family offices and their operating assets, it is critical to have a focus on the information security aspects of the technology front.

We regularly run phishing campaigns to see who, within the organization, falls prey. We also invest in various technologies that are designed to protect and help recover from a threat actor penetrating our defenses.

— Jerry J. Harrison, Jr., Chief Strategy Officer, 1st Franklin Financial

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The focus will be around efficiency, a mindset shift from adoption to cost cutting. The cost of running a single family office over the last 10 years has increased; rising costs include executive compensation and technology. As soon as returns decline, people can become worried that a family office is a cost center as opposed to a value creator, and as a result they can become a lot more cost conscious. The only thing that will save it is there will be more negotiating power for them with the investment managers over the next couple of years.

— Hugo King-Oakley, Head of Private Markets & Community at GPFO

We have a 23-person team on our family office side of things. About 10 of them are in Chicago, 10 in Milwaukee, and three in Minneapolis. Five years ago, it would have required getting many of these people in a room for meetings. Now on a Zoom, we can bring any of our 23 teammates who are needed into a meeting in order to have a meaningful discussion and pull those key players in, and the families can be anywhere.

It was much more difficult to service some of these families in a pre-COVID environment – now it’s more streamlined, and we can bring in a lot of family members who aren’t all together all the time.

One of the hardest things for some of these families to do is to get everybody around the table to make decisions. You can hop on a Zoom at any time and get the key decision makers around the virtual table. You can get a decision made. The way things happen today is so much more accelerated than it used to be, in a really positive way.

— Dan Matola, Partner, Senior Relationship Manager, Family Office Services, Curi RMB Capital

About the Author

Margaret Steen

Margaret Steen is the editor of FO Pro, The Family Office Professional. Based in Silicon Valley, she has written for Family Business Magazine for more than 15 years.


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