As summer comes to a close, one theme continues to surface across my conversations with Family Offices, advisors, investors, and industry leaders: the Family Office itself is evolving.
At the Opal Family Office & Private Wealth Management Forum in the Hamptons, conversations moved well beyond investment strategy. We talked about relationships and trust, changing family expectations, purpose and impact, technology, and what it takes to build something that endures across generations.
Those themes carry directly into this month’s Family Office Access newsletter. We’re looking at how wealth management and the modern Family Office are evolving, revisiting our conversation on aligning capital with purpose, and introducing you to a member using technology to bring greater transparency to private markets.
As always, I hope these ideas spark a conversation of your own.
From the Field
From the Hamptons: Wealth, Legacy & the Next Generation
After three days at the Opal Family Office & Private Wealth Legacy Summit and Next Generation Family Office Leadership Brunch, one question stayed with me: What does wealth mean to the next generation?
Across conversations about relationships, investing, AI, governance, philanthropy, and family dynamics, three themes continued to surface:
Three things I came home thinking about
1. The Great Wealth Transfer is also a transfer of responsibility.
The conversation is moving beyond transferring assets to preparing the next generation to steward them. Governance, values, financial fluency and lived experience increasingly matter alongside investment strategy.
2. Wealth is being defined more broadly.
Purpose, philanthropy and impact weren’t side conversations. They were woven into how families are thinking about capital, responsibility and legacy.
3. Relationships remain the connective tissue.
Technology can make Family Offices more informed and efficient, but trust, communication and human judgment remain central to how families make decisions across generations.
The inheritance may be financial. The legacy is what we choose to do with it.
I shared a few more reflections and stories from the week on LinkedIn.
Join This Month’s MasterClass
The wealth management model is changing, and Family Offices are evolving alongside it.
Families today have more choices than ever around how they structure their Family Office, select advisors, allocate capital, integrate investment and planning functions, and prepare the next generation to participate in decisions.
Join us for a Family Office Access MasterClass with Scott Roulston as we explore what decades of change across wealth management can teach us about the modern Family Office and where the industry may be headed next.
Featuring:
🔸 Scott Roulston, Advisory Partner, The Pritzker Organization Board Member, Wellspring Family Office
We’ll Explore:
- The evolution of wealth management and the advisory model
- How AI is changing expectations of advisors
- Consolidation, independence and Family Office structures
- What makes patient Family Office capital different
- Governance and preparing the next generation
🗓 WHEN: Thursday, August 20th
🕚 TIME: 1 pm – 2 pm EST
Whether you’re raising capital, serving Family Offices, or expanding your network, I think you’ll come away with practical ideas you can apply right away.
Featured Event
Women in Wealth | Dallas + Fort Worth
I’ll be heading to Texas this month for several days of conversations across the Family Office and private wealth community, including two Women in Wealth gatherings with JABOY Productions.
On September 16 in Dallas, I’ll moderate ‘From Wealth Creator to Capital Steward: Claiming Agency in the Next Chapter’, exploring how women develop the confidence, judgment, and capability to direct wealth, from ownership and investment fluency to community and stewardship.
The following day in Fort Worth, my colleague Rosemary Beyer will moderate a second conversation we co-organized, ‘From Visibility to Influence: How Women Turn Access Into Influence and Opportunity’. We intentionally designed the two discussions to build upon one another, moving from agency and capital stewardship to visibility, influence and opportunity.
🔸 Dallas: September 16
🔸 Fort Worth: September 17
I’ll be arriving in Dallas on September 14 to attend the Private Wealth Management Summit before the JABOY events. If you’ll be in Dallas or Fort Worth that week, I’d love to connect.
By invitation only. Space is limited. Request an invitation →
Featured Event
If you’re looking for another opportunity to connect with leaders across the Family Office ecosystem, consider:
📍The Hong Kong Family Office & High Net Worth Conference
September 8 I Hong Kong I Register here
Produced by DC Finance
📍The Singapore Private Wealth & Investment Forum
September 10 I Singapore I Register here
Produced by DC Finance
📍Private Wealth Management Summit September
September 14-16 I Dallas I Register here
Produced by Marcus Evans
📍The Dominican Legacy Gala
September 19 I Miami I Register here
Produced by Jaboy Productions
📍Dubai Capital Activation Summit
September 21-24 I Dubai I Register here
Produced by FiftyPoints VC
Explore our full Events Calendar for additional opportunities throughout the year.
Member Spotlight
One of the most meaningful parts of Family Office Access is highlighting members who are building solutions to challenges within the private markets themselves.
This month, we’re featuring Victoria D. Bills, CEO of Allocraft AI, an AI-powered platform helping family offices, RIAs and other allocators evaluate private-market funds and managers more efficiently while preserving something traditional diligence processes can lose: how and why an investment decision was made.
Private-market diligence often spans documents, research, workflows and institutional knowledge across multiple systems. Allocraft brings that intelligence together, allowing investment teams to codify mandates, evaluate opportunities against consistent criteria, trace diligence findings back to their sources, and map relationships across funds, portfolio companies, partners and LPs.
The result is a more efficient diligence process and a durable record of institutional knowledge. In Allocraft’s benchmark, the platform produced a 94% reduction in analyst document work, freeing teams to spend less time gathering information and more time evaluating it.
“A lot of what we know as investment professionals lives in our heads. We rarely write it down. Allocraft exists to change that, to give family offices and other allocators a system that remembers not just what was decided, but how and why.” Victoria D. Bills
Family Office Access members can try Allocraft complimentary for one month. Schedule a demo to receive one month of platform access with no obligation.
Interested in learning more about Allocraft’s technology or exploring a potential partnership? We’re happy to facilitate an introduction.
A Project Close to My Heart
From Echo to Athena: The Evolution of Women in the Great Wealth Transfer brings together 24 contributors exploring women, wealth, leadership and legacy.
My chapter focuses on mentorship and took on unexpected meaning as I wrote it while navigating the sale of the business I had spent a decade building and stepping into a new professional chapter.
It reminded me that mentors aren’t only important as we build toward something. They can be equally valuable in helping us navigate what comes next.
I’m grateful to Ruschelle Khanna, Ann Priftis and my fellow contributors for creating a space for these perspectives to be shared.
Thank you for being part of this community.
I appreciate the conversations, introductions, and ideas so many of you share throughout the year. They continue to shape the way we think about our programming, research, and the resources we create for members.
I hope to see many of you this fall, and as always, I’d love to hear what you’re seeing across the Family Office landscape.
Warm regards,
Danielle Patterson
Executive Director of Family Office
