Family offices have become the structure of choice for the world’s wealthiest families, as they offer control, discretion and a centralised way to manage everything from investments to intergenerational planning. As they multiply across the world, so has the demand for advisers who understand their unique needs.
A family office structure offers a centralised and discreet way for families to manage their lives, and a family office adviser acts on behalf of the family – the principals – to keep track of everything, including managing their liquid investment portfolio, investing in property, maintaining luxury assets such as yachts and private jets, and even keeping tabs of principals’ school fees.
In addition to financial expertise, the best family office advisers can offer advice on how to build healthy family dynamics – especially when it comes to long-term strategies to manage wealth across generations.
Explore the other rankings within the 2025 Spear’s Wealth Management Indices:
- Best UHNW Wealth Managers
- Best HNW Wealth Managers
- Best Wealth Managers: Jersey
- Best Wealth Managers: Guernsey
- Best Wealth Managers: Monaco
- Best Wealth Managers: Singapore
- Best Wealth Managers: Switzerland
- Best Wealth Managers: Middle East
The advisers featured in the Spear’s family office advisers index are some of the best in the business. While some are representatives from multi-family offices (a large structure which supports more than one family in managing their wealth), others come from the established private banks that have their own internal family office service. Regardless of their background, their focus remains on delivering high-quality, tailored support trusted by families with sophisticated assets around the world.
Content from our partners
In 2025, family office services providers faced challenges due to an unstable market, resulting in a focus on making sure that their portfolios were able to weather the financial storm.
At the dawn of the great wealth transfer, many advisers are thinking about how the next generation will inherit wealth, and our research showed a number of them were occupied with educating private clients and thinking about how family dynamics may change, as well as how family ethos may be different.
This year’s rankings feature leading figures in the field, including the likes of Jeremy Dunn and Francois-Olivier Mercier, who head up UBS’s new Global Family and Institutional Wealth (GFIW) team, which supports UHNW clients who often have very well-established family offices and wealth structures, and similar needs to institutional clients.
Despite the challenges brought on family offices by global instability, they remain one of the most significant categories of institutional investors. According to a 2025 With Intelligence report, single-family offices now command assets worth over $4.6 trillion globally.
Click the links below to jump to a section of this article:
- Methodology
- The best family office service advisers: some names to know
- The best family office service advisers: the complete list
- Contact us
Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to The Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
The best family office service advisers: some names to know
Charlotte Filsell
- Focus: Wealth management and philanthropy
- Ranking: Top Recommended
- Firm: Schroders Family Office Service
A regular fixture in the Spear’s rankings of top family office service providers, Charlotte Filsell is renowned in her field for a keen focus on service and her knowledge of emerging trends in the family office sector.
Her career has included spells at HSBC (twice) and UBS on the way to becoming head of family office services at Sandaire. In the wake of the company’s 2020 acquisition by Schroders, Filsell now leads the latter’s UK family office services team, supporting individuals, family offices, trusts, business owners and charities.
Read Charlotte Filsell’s full profile on Spears500.com
Robert Kalff
- Focus: Comprehensive wealth management
- Ranking: Top Recommended
- Firm: HSBC Global Private Banking
Robert Kalff is the head of HSBC Global Private Banking’s family office operations. He has over 25 years of experience working in private and investment banking and has held prominent roles at JP Morgan, UBS, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.
Kalff joined HSBC in 2022 to help the bank expand its ultra-high-net-worth clientele and drive new business development. He tells Spear’s that one of his core priorities is to nurture relationships with family offices. ‘Our aim is to find out what the client is trying to achieve with and from their wealth,’ he says.
Read Robert Kalff’s full profile at Spears500.com
Jeremy Dunn
- Focus: Global family and institutional wealth
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: UBS
Jeremy Dunn is a managing director in UBS’s Global Family and Institutional Wealth (GFIW) team, which manages the wealth of some of the bank’s most sophisticated clients.
Dunn, who has 25 years of experience in global markets and investment banking, including hedge funds, connects family offices to public and private market investments, financing, asset management and investment banking services. The team is well equipped, he explains, to deal with multi-banked and multi-jurisdictional clients.
Read Jeremy Dunn’s full profile on Spears500.com
Annamaria Koerling
- Focus: Strategic wealth advice
- Ranking: Top Recommended
- Firm: Delfin Private Office
Annamaria Koerling plied her trade at Cazenove and became head of wealth management at C. Hoare & Co. before co-founding Owl Private Office in 2017.
The firm subsequently underwent a ‘demerger’ to allow its key figures to specialise in the type of work and client base that suits them best. This gave rise to Delfin Private Office, ‘an overarching advisory business offering family office services to global families’, where Koerling is managing partner.
Read Annamaria Koerling’s full profile at Spears500.com
Catherine Grum
- Focus: Wealth planning for the next generation
- Ranking: Top Recommended
- Firm: Catherine Grum Consultancy
Following roles at KPMG and BDO, Catherine Grum set up her own firm, Catherine Grum Consultancy, in 2024. She tells Spear’s that the aim of the firm is ‘to advise wealthy individuals and families who are starting with quite a purposive approach to their wealth – helping them to think through what it’s actually for, what their goals and dreams are, and then how that wealth supports them.’
Grum specialises in advising the next generation, who see her as a counterpart rather than ‘their parents’ adviser’.
Read Catherine Grum’s full profile on Spears500.com
The best family office service advisers: the complete list
Contact us
- To apply for inclusion in The Spear’s 500, complete our submission form.
- For further information about rankings, please email research@spearswms.com; we aim to respond to all queries within two working days.
- For commercial enquiries and questions relating to enhanced profiles, please contact Commercial Director Shady Elkholy: shady.elkholy@spearswms.com
- To keep up to date with the Spear’s 500, subscribe to our magazine, newsletter and follow Spear’s on Linkedin and Instagram.
- If you have missed calendar deadlines for our research cycles in 2025, you can still register your interest for updates about upcoming research and rankings.
- Click here to order a print copy of The Spear’s 500.
