Sustainable Family Office

Benchmarking Study

Sustainable Family Offices is a new benchmarking study that examines how family offices (FOs) of various sizes, structures, and operating in a variety of geographies, view and act on two critical forms of sustainability:

  1. Resilience and endurance, in terms of how well positioned FOs are to be passed from one generation to the next

  2. Resource and capital deployment, understanding the sustainability of FO investments, including sustainable investing in public markets as well as impact investing in private markets

 
 

Below are some top line findings:

  • Who is participating in this research and how are the offices structured? 

    • Over 65% are family principals

    • Size of family office $AUM- 1/3 under $100M; 1/3 between $100M and $1B; 1/3 over $1B

    • 35% outsource almost all the staff

    • 60% have already undergone at least 1 generational transition of the FO; 25% have seen their office passed through 2 generations or more

  • Family Office Sustainability is important, yet many offices are not embracing practices that help with sustainability.

    • The vast majority of respondents believe family office sustainability is important, and that their office will transition

    • The majority reported that all family members do not have FT or PT roles; spouses of family principals are more often not involved

    • The majority do not know who will be the successor to the current generation; most report that succession process is not transparent nor given enough time at meetings; majority are not regularly benchmarking other practices

  • Sustainable investing is growing in select pockets, market rate results are being achieved, additional capital to be deployed in the coming years.

    • The clear majority understand what sustainable investing is, and believe it is not concessionary to market rate to traditional benchmarks

    • The majority report that sustainable investments have performed as well as traditional investments, yet 43% don’t seem to know how performance has been (may be up or down)

    • While the majority of respondents have less than 25% committed to sustainable investments, there are another ~20% that have greater than 75% of total capital in sustainable investing; 60% of the total believe they will deploy more into sustainable investments in the next 3-5 years