Family offices continue to evolve and seek innovative ways to navigate an ever-changing environment. The 2024 North America Family Office Report explores this journey by examining 183 family offices across Canada and the United States, offering comparisons to global peers.
Learn more about trends impacting family offices, including succession planning, strategy shifts, private markets, strengthening governance and new technologies.
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The landscape of family offices in North America continues to evolve, with many evaluating their investment strategies and opportunities to enhance their effectiveness in current market environments.
Sixty percent of family offices anticipate the majority of inter-generational wealth transfers will take place within the next ten years. Despite this, only 53 percent of North American family offices have a succession plan in place, and of those, only 30 percent have a formal, written plan.
Taking a more proactive approach will help the 54 percent of respondents who feel the next generation is inadequately qualified (same as 2023) or the 46 percent who feel they are too young to assume immediate leadership roles (up from 42 percent last year).
However, family offices with a succession plan see themselves as prepared for succession (79 percent) or at least in an intermediate position (21 percent).
Favourable market conditions, with more than 40 percent of respondents expecting returns to exceed 10 percent this year, have influenced North American family offices to adopt a more balanced strategy between growth and wealth preservation.
In 2024, 61 percent of family offices described their approach as balanced, up from 56 percent last year.
This shift has had a negligible impact on the 30 percent of family offices focused on growth (down from 31 percent in 2023) but has been more significant for the nine percent now focused on wealth preservation (compared to 14 percent in the same period last year).
Private market investments, particularly those in private equity and private credit, continue to be the largest-held asset class for North American family offices.
This builds on trends of recent years, with average portfolio share up one percent from the year prior to 30 percent for private markets. Looking ahead, 39 percent of family offices intend to increase their private credit position, 25 percent plan to increase their private equity fund allocation and 33 percent plan to bolster the investments in direct private equity.
Family offices prioritize their investment function, with 68 percent of North American family offices including an investment committee as part of their governance structure.However, only 41 percent of those surveyed have a family office board, which is attributed to one-third of participating family offices being controlled by first-generation wealth creators, who rely on informal decision-making processes and have yet to formalize their governance.
Looking ahead, 71 percent of family offices expect increasing emphasis on governance structures to continue.
Technology adoption is on the rise within family offices, including the use of wealth aggregation platforms, which provide an overview of their organization’s holistic financial position.
The adoption rate of these programs is at 46 percent, up from 38 percent last year, with another 17 percent of respondents expressing a desire for them.
Although the introduction of AI is still in its early stages, 11 percent of family offices are using the technology, and 30 percent indicate a desire to use adopt it in their organization.
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Review the trends that impacted North American family offices in recent years.
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