The maxim that “If you’ve seen one family office, you’ve seen one family office” is perhaps getting a bit stale these days, but it still applies at least in the sense that every family is different, facing their own challenges, pursuing their own goals and dealing with their own dynamics and discontents. The primary job of a family office is to respond and adapt to those realities.
Or, at least, that’s the primary job of single-family offices, which, obviously, have just one family to serve. But what about multi-family offices? For them, “family office” is not just a service and support model, but also a business model. That alone makes them different from other FOs, but so does the fact that they must respond to and adapt to the families they support at scale. How do MFOs support their client families—in some cases dozens of them—and all their differences, while at the same time turning a profit (one hopes)?
We think those are good questions, but nearly all the global studies (and much of the media coverage) of family offices focus squarely on SFOs. That’s one reason why Canadian Family Offices in 2024 started conducting an annual MFO survey, the latest iteration of which just wrapped up. It’s also the reason that this month we are focusing on this often-overlooked segment of the family office sector with a special report dedicated to multi-family offices.
The coverage in this special report will be informed by our recent survey of nearly 80 MFOs, including several that agreed to participate in one-on-one interviews. Many of the questions have been revised and refocused to develop more relevant insights into how MFOs operate and how they support their client families today. One of the more productive changes was to the way we asked about the most significant challenges MFOs face. Rather than asking about external hurdles (tax policy, macroeconomics, etc.), we asked about the most significant issues MFOs themselves encounter and about the most significant challenges their client families are facing. The answers were revealing, and they went a long way toward helping us identify areas to explore further.
Here is a taste of what we’ll be covering this month:
- Are there global best practices for Canadian MFOs to follow and, if so, what are they?
- “Finding the unicorns”: How and why MFOs are confronting a talent crunch
- Is there a “right” revenue model for MFOs—fees, percentage of AUM, or something else?
- Cybersecurity is a growing threat. How are MFOs responding?
On top of that, we will be releasing our full MFO study, The Multi-Family Office Landscape in Canada 2026, later this month, and a summary of its key findings will be published on our website. (In the meantime, ICYMI, you can read last year’s report here.)
Our goal with this special report and our annual survey is to help fill in the knowledge gap about MFOs generally and Canadian multi-family offices specifically. What we do know is that this is a dynamic, growing part of the financial services landscape—and one that comes with its own set of differences.
As ever, reader feedback is welcome. Please address comments, criticisms and concerns to newsroom@canadianfamilyoffices.com.
Joe Chidley is Managing Editor of Canadian Family Offices.
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