The term ‘multi-family office’ has been widely used in wealth management circles for decades, but its future is in doubt amid calls for it to be ‘permanently retired’.
At first glance, a multi-family office (MFO) is most easily understood as an alternative to a single-family office (SFO). In the latter case, the organisation’s purpose is to manage the wealth and other interests of just one family. MFOs, therefore, can be understood as organisations that manage the wealth and other interests of multiple families.
However, this broad distinction obscures the more commercial nature of many so-called MFOs – which often more have more in common with wealth management firms than they do with SFOs, according to Michael Thrasher, the New York-based founder and editor of the family office newsletter Modus News.
Thrasher announced in a LinkedIn post last weekend that his outlet would use the term ‘MFO’ ‘rarely or never again’.
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‘If you’re charging clients fees for investment management and financial planning, etc., you are a private wealth management firm,’ he wrote. ‘If you’re a non-commercial organization doing that stuff for one or more families, you’re a family office.’
Thrasher added, in comments below the post, that MFO as a term has ‘lost meaning because of how it’s leveraged in marketing’.
[See also: Single family office (SFO) v multi-family office (MFO)]
‘The best way to differentiate these is by whether they are businesses serving clients and charging them fees, or a non-commercial endeavor; a personal expense of one or more families,’ Thrasher wrote.
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A single-family office (SFO) exclusively focuses on one family’s financial, legal, and lifestyle needs, and the cost of running one typically averages at around 0.5-1 per cent of assets under management (AuM).
Gilles Erulin founded family office consultancy Westwick Partners in 2013, but before that spent 26 years at Financière Pinault, the single family office of the Pinault family. He tells Spear’s: ‘The minute you are on a percentage basis of AuM, you become an asset manager.’
‘The difference between a family office and an asset manager, if you ask me, is: are you billing me fixed cost? That’s a multi-family office. If you’re billing me in basis points of assets under management, you’re an asset manager,’ he says.
Mike Tan, global head, wealth planning and family advisory, Standard Chartered, previously told Spear’s that an MFO ‘allows the family to benefit from the services of a family office, without having to invest in the personnel and staff by themselves.’
[See also: Why outsourcing has become the defining question for modern family offices]
The distinction between the two is less precise in real life. Spear’s recently interviewed Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin, who launched the family office House of Vanderbilt earlier this year.
She described the office to Spear’s as a financial and cultural ‘nexus’ for the over 800 living descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, adding that she had taken inspiration from another famous American family.
‘I really look at the Rockefeller model and I think it’s absolutely brilliant what they’ve done,’ she told Spear’s, noting it was never confined to the Rockefellers themselves but ‘expanded’ outward over generations.
Former Morgan Stanley Wealth Management executive Greg Fleming founded Rockefeller Capital Management in 2018 with support from hedge fund Viking Global. According to a recent Bloomberg article, Fleming has ‘leveraged the Rockefeller name to scale the family office into a far bigger and more ambitious enterprise. As of June, the firm said it’s responsible for $224 billion in client assets, a sliver of which is the Rockefellers’.’
[See also: Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin launches investment platform at NYFW]
Thrasher, and those that share his view, think the MFO definition has stretched beyond breaking point – but not everyone agrees.
John Russo, managing director of LS Private, the family office arm of law firm Lawrence Stephens, tells Spear’s that abandoning the term altogether would represent an ‘overcorrection’, and that a genuine MFO ‘is not simply an investment manager with a more expensive website’.
The problem, Russo says, is the practice of private banks and wealth managers passing themselves off as MFOs because of the term’s perceived cachet: ‘Too many wealth managers have now discovered that using that phrase sounds more exclusive than “private client”.’
[See also: The best family office advisory & consultancy services in 2026]
‘The banks will tell you “we do that, we have a dedicated family office team”. You don’t really. You found a banker who kind of fell into it and gave them a title,’ Russo says. ‘It’s like going to a five-star hotel and saying “we have a spa”. No, you’ve got a set of weights, a treadmill and a shower.’
For Russo, the family office model continues to appeal to UHNW families due to the range of what they offer, covering areas like legal oversight, succession planning, political oversight, and philanthropy.
‘I think it’s difficult to be a trusted adviser while also selling financial products,’ Russo says. ‘I think it’s why you’re seeing a lot of families leaving banks en masse and looking for more bespoke boutique solutions.’
Thrasher’s post is ‘a fair piece of scrutiny’, according to Rupert Phelps, an adviser to single family offices and a regular member of the Spear’s Awards judging panel.
Phelps remembers the term ‘MFO’ coming in for some criticism at a Spear’s conference at least 12 years ago (dated by the fact it took place at Speechly Bircham, before the firm became Charles Russell Speechlys in November 2014).
[See also: Stonehage Fleming: Managing wealth of world’s leading families]
He favours ‘private investment office’ for wealth management firms that offer a bespoke, high-touch service to a small number of very wealthy families on a commercial basis.
For Phelps, ‘co-operative family office’ is a better term for the sort of organisation that evolves to manage the affairs of perhaps three or four families ‘who wish to preserve the control and confidentiality of an SFO, but share the overheads – and expand the investment opportunities and scope for peer-group learning and intelligence’.
‘True co-operative family offices,’ Phelps adds, ‘therefore, do not have the growth aims of external-facing, commercial businesses.’
[See also: The best family office advisers]
Russo tells Spear’s that there are plenty of examples of firms which assume the MFO mantle, but are subject to the commercial imperatives of a more conventional wealth management business.
‘The only thing they’re interested in is a singular purpose: “I want to get as much as your money as possible, so I can put it through our system, and we can manage it.”’
The head of one unnamed large wealth management firm, Russo says, ‘once told me that the only reason they do any family office work is to get access to that money’.
‘There are people who can get offended, but I think there’s a wonderful honesty to that,’ he adds. ‘A lot of investment management firms have repositioned themselves as MFOs, but the only thing they really do is investment wealth management.’
[See also: Sharp rise in family office plans to shift strategic allocations]
Gilles Erulin says that he thinks banks and asset managers ‘have done a tremendous job in adapting’ to the needs of UHNW families, but that crucially, ‘they’re still costing an enormous amount of money’.
‘If you have a billion under management, you should be able to run a family office probably for 50 basis points,’ he says. ‘This £5 million is probably one fourth or one fifth of hidden costs: what custodians, asset managers, two per cent commitment fee etc. will cost you – not even mentioning carried interest if the assets perform.’
For Charlotte Thorne, of Capital Generation Partners’ (CapGen), the term MFO implies an organisation that is ‘still family owned’ and one whose aim is ‘to defray the costs of a family office across multiple families’.
This, she tells Spear’s, is a ‘perfectly legitimate approach’, but one that can lead to the families questioning whether ‘conflicts and cross-cutting behavioural incentives’ are at play.
Along with Ian Barnard and Khaled Said, Thorne is a co-founder of CapGen, which was set up in 2006. Over the last five years CapGen has grown from 22 to 42 clients; it now has $5 billion AuM.
CapGen’s website does not use the term ‘multi-family office’ frequently or prominently, but says it combines ‘the attention to detail and personal service of a family office, with the rigour and capabilities of an institution’.
The firm’s roots are in Said Holdings, a single family office started by self-made billionaire and philanthropist Wafic Said – Khaled’s father and the man who gave his name to Oxford University’s business school.
CapGen’s chairman, Michel de Carvalho, is married to the multi-billionaire Heineken heiress Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken. Forbes estimates the family’s net worth at $17.1 billion, putting them at number 160 on their billionaires list.
[See also: Spear’s meets Michel de Carvalho]
In a 2021 interview with Spear’s, Michel de Carvalho said their family office in Amsterdam had money with five banks or wealth managers, including CapGen, Goldman Sachs, Citi and JP Morgan.
CapGen’s independence from its clients and from other shareholders, Thorne adds, liberates the firm in a way that she says ‘may not be possible in a business that is still ultimately family owned’.
A prominent and historic firm often described as an MFO, Stonehage Fleming, was acquired by US giant Corient earlier this year alongside another UK business, Stanhope Capital. When the deal closed, the Miami-headquartered, Abu Dhabi-backed acquirer announced that it had become ‘the world’s largest non-bank wealth manager and multi-family office focused on ultra-high- and high-net-worth clients’, with assets surpassing $500 billion.
