Effective Strategies for Managing Family Office Investments

How to manage family office investments effectively? First of all, set up your goals, or rather a policy, which will define the objectives, timeframes, and benchmarks for your investments. Then, it is time for discovery—uncovering the real investment risk that the family is willing to take. With all of that ready, make sure your team has enough experience and knowledge to put the strategies to life. Finally, obtain tech tools that will help you improve family office investment management and monitor your efforts. Do you want to learn more? Then keep reading!

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How to Manage Family Office Investments? The Framework

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Effective family office investment management is a process that involves designing a framework guiding you throughout the process. Therefore, let’s start by establishing the steps you should undertake while preparing your strategies.

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Come Up with a Policy

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First, you need to create and write down the investment policy for a given family. This requires you to consider the following:

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• family goals,
• deadlines,
• measures for monitoring and control,
• portfolio rebalancing frequency,
• roles and responsibilities within your family office.

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With all of that prepared, coin the statement that will act as the basis for your investment management. Make sure that you follow its principles throughout the investment management process.

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Uncover Risk Tolerance for the Sake of Asset Allocation

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Every family will have a slightly different perception of risk and gains they want to achieve. Some might prefer assets that are safe and easy to liquidate, while others might prefer high-gain, high-risk investments or a balance between these two. To manage family office investments effectively, you need to understand your client's risk tolerance.

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Here, asking the client isn’t enough—you need to look into data, such as the client's current portfolio and previous investments. You should also consider the family's goals, both those stated by them and those derived from their current financial situation. After you do all of that, it is time to plan the asset allocation framework that you will follow and find the golden means to maximize profit while minimizing risks and tailoring the service to the needs of your client.

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Evaluate Your Team

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With all of the above ready, you need to ensure that your team is well-prepared to manage the family's finances. You already know what type of assets the wealth will be allocated to, so you should verify whether your team is experienced in handling them. What if you see some gaps in expertise?

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Here, you have two possible options:

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• You can hire additional experts if the gap covers a type of asset that you will handle often.
• You may build a network of outsourced experts for the rarer yet potentially possible investments.

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The choice depends on the need for particular competencies. If you need an expert in a given field (e.g., real estate in Africa) available at all times, you should find one and hire them; if you’re expecting particular investments to be less frequent and they don’t require constant oversight, you might select an outsourced specialist. Also, make sure that your team is capable of handling highly complex scenarios where multiple team members and experts need to collaborate.

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Get the Right Tools

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Investment management in a family office requires you to have a great overview of your client’s portfolio and transactions. You need to be able to access all the data quickly and draw accurate conclusions. In simple terms, you need a good IT solution.

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For this, you will need an end-to-end wealth management platform. Such an application will enable you to integrate all the data, quickly calculate investment risks, and rebalance portfolios. Moreover, it will empower your reporting, making it quicker and easier, which is crucial for presenting your results to the family members.

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You should make sure that you invest in an AI-powered platform, as this will improve your family office investment management even further. How? Machine learning models fed with historical data will help you identify and act on new investment opportunities that you could miss otherwise. Hence, it will be a true game-changer.

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Continuously Monitor and Evaluate Your Investments

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Finally, you shouldn’t use financial reporting just for the sake of presenting your results to the stakeholders—you need to treat it as a valuable tool for evaluating your performance. The market changes, and so do the strategies; hence, you need to constantly monitor your investments to find bottlenecks in the process and improve your management.

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A Healthy Family Office Means Better Investment Management

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Apart from the above framework, you need to remember what a family office is: a business like any other. What does it have to do with investment management?

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The better your family office functions, the more effective the leadership will be, leading to improved investment management. Great leadership is the basis for employee engagement, and good organization stimulates productivity. Therefore, you need to look at your organization from a more holistic perspective.

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The Takeaway

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How can family office investments be managed effectively and efficiently? You need to design a framework and ensure that your business is well-organized. By doing so, you will be able to understand your client's needs, adhere to them, and ensure that everybody on board does their work the best way possible.

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You may also read: How to Start a Family Office

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