Altoo Blog

16 April 2026

Adopted but Not Activated: The Family Office Governance Problem

Walk through any well-run family office and you will find the evidence of governance: board minutes filed in order, investment policy statements on the shared drive, a family charter that went through three rounds of legal review before it was signed. The documentation is real. The effort that produced it was genuine. And yet the governance — the actual behaviour that frameworks are supposed to shape — often looks much the same as it did before the frameworks existed.

The Adoption Picture

On paper, the governance infrastructure is largely there across family offices and, for the many whose wealth traces back to an operating enterprise, associated family businesses. Deloitte’s Private Company Outlook found that 83% of family enterprise leaders report having a formalised governance framework in place. 2024 research from Deloitte found that 73% of single-family offices have a board of directors.

But adoption and activation are not the same thing. PwC’s Global Family Business Survey 2025, which gathered responses from 1,325 family businesses across 62 territories, found that 83% respondents said their enterprise is guided by a clear set of family values. Only 57% had documented those values. The framework — the intention, the culture, the shared sense of purpose — exists for most families. The activation step of committing it to paper in a form that can be referenced, reviewed, and passed to the next generation has been skipped by more than a quarter of them.

Only 30% of the same respondents had established a family constitution. A constitution is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is the document that converts a family’s values and intentions into enforceable agreements about how decisions get made, how disputes get resolved, and how the enterprise connects to the people it belongs to. Without one, governance remains aspirational.

The Activation Gap

If the adoption numbers suggest broad uptake, the activation numbers tell a different story.

Campden Wealth’s Operational Excellence Report 2025 found that the proportion of family offices with a strategic investment framework declined from 77% to 60% year on year. Family offices are not simply failing to adopt governance. In at least one measurable area, they are regressing.

Complexity is a driver of formalisation, but it is not a guarantee of it. The J.P. Morgan Global Family Office Report 2026, drawing on 333 family offices across 30 countries, found that 66% of business-owning families have a family constitution vs. approximately half of non-business-owning families. Families managing operating businesses face greater coordination demands, and that pressure pushes them toward structure. But even among those who have felt that pressure most acutely, a third still have not formalised the foundational document.

The structural gap extends to the forums governance depends on. According to the UBS/Agreus Family Enterprise Governance Report 2026, which surveyed 106 family offices, only 32% have a dedicated family council, a standing body through which families translate governance principles into ongoing decisions and communication. A board without a family council is a governance structure with no mechanism for the family itself to participate. The formal accountability sits in the boardroom; the informal power sits everywhere else.

None of these findings suggests that wealthy families do not care about governance. The adoption data confirms that most wealthy families care about governance. But the activation gap suggests that caring about governance and sustaining it are different disciplines. The second appears to be considerably harder than the first.

What Living Governance Looks Like

The research also shows the differences between families whose governance frameworks work and those whose frameworks become ceremonial.

The UBS/Agreus report found that families with structured review processes — governance that is revisited and renewed, not simply maintained — rate their boards as 2.5 times more effective than families without such processes. Governance structures are not self-sustaining. They require deliberate intervention to remain functional: scheduled reviews, explicit accountability for follow-through, and a shared commitment to updating frameworks as the family’s circumstances change.

Communication is the other variable. The same report found that families who hold regular meetings dedicated to non-financial matters — the relational and cultural dimensions of shared wealth — rate their communication effectiveness twice as highly as those who do not. High-functioning families do not treat communication as a byproduct of governance meetings. They treat it as a governance activity in its own right.

PwC’s research adds a useful illustration, even if it does not reduce to a single data point. The family enterprises that consistently sustain effective governance tend to treat their values documentation not as a founding document but as a living one. It gets refreshed on a defined cycle, often every five years, and built through a process that draws input from across the family rather than being handed down from the founding generation. The document is evidence of a process, not a substitute for one.

In other words, governance is not a project. It is a practice.

The Visibility Condition

There is a reason governance frameworks are adopted but not activated, and it is not purely a question of commitment or discipline. It is a question of what governance requires in order to function.

Governance is, at its core, a decision-making system. For that system to work, the people inside it need to be able to see what they are governing. The actual state of the wealth: the performance of current allocations, the commitments that have been made and the ones that are approaching. A board of directors that meets quarterly without access to a consolidated, current view of the family’s total financial position is not governing. It is conducting a ritual.

The families whose governance frameworks survive are the ones who have solved the information problem alongside the structural one. They have created the right conditions: shared visibility, a common source of truth, and the ability to make decisions on the basis of what is actually true rather than what can be recalled or assembled from partial sources.

Governance structures are necessary. They establish accountability, clarify authority, and protect the family’s collective interests across time. But structures do not activate themselves. They need the information infrastructure to operate. For many family offices, that infrastructure remains the missing component.

The Activation Layer

The transition from ceremonial governance to functional governance is not primarily a structural redesign. Most wealthy families already have the frameworks. What they need is the layer that makes those frameworks operable.

Purpose-built wealth platforms now give family offices something they have historically lacked: a single, consolidated view of the family’s total financial position, updated in real time, accessible to the right people at the right level of detail. When a board meets, it can work from a shared picture rather than a compiled one. When a family council convenes to review the family charter, members can ground the conversation in current reality — what is held, how it is performing, what decisions are approaching. When a family constitution is refreshed, the values and principles it encodes can be tested against the actual record of how decisions have been made.

The Altoo Wealth Platform supports this activation layer directly. Through consolidated reporting across custodians and asset classes, role-based access that ensures each family member and adviser sees what is appropriate to their role, and multi-stakeholder visibility that gives governance bodies the shared intelligence they need, Altoo provides the information infrastructure that governance structures depend on.

Contact us for a demonstration to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform transforms your governance framework from a document into a decision-making system that works as well in practice as it was designed to on paper.

14 April 2026

Succession Planning’s Missing Ingredient: Visibility

According to Campden Wealth and RBC’s 2024 North America Family Office Report, 80% of family offices considered themselves effective at intergenerational wealth transfer. Yet only 53% had any formal succession plan. Just 30% of those plans were documented. Run the arithmetic: roughly 16% of family offices had a written succession plan.

Deloitte found that 41% of single family offices will tackle generational succession before 2034. The exact same percentage had no succession plan in place. The pattern extends to the family business owners whose wealth many family offices manage. Separate Deloitte research found that 85% of family business executives agreed CEO succession planning was critical to long-term success, but only 57% had established a plan. Fewer than a quarter were actively implementing one.

The evidence points to a confidence-competence gap to be urgently addressed. Developing a plan is the obvious starting point. UBS and Agreus’s 2026 Family Enterprise Governance Report found that families with succession plans in place are nearly four times more likely to rate their next generation as prepared for wealth stewardship.

The next question, though, is what “prepared” actually means in practice.

Documentation Is Necessary but Not Sufficient

Informal or verbal succession agreements account for 70% of the plans that do exist, according to Campden Wealth’s research. Verbal agreements are less likely to survive the passing of the person who held them in mind. They do not account for changing tax environments, new family members, or assets acquired after the original conversation. They cannot be audited, updated, or handed to an adviser who joins the family office years later.

The written plan, where it exists, is often static. Drafted once, filed, and revisited only when prompted by an adviser or a life event. Awareness without action means a plan becomes a symbolic gesture rather than a working framework.

For families with assets spread across multiple custodians, private equity commitments, real estate holdings, and a family trust, a static document cannot carry the load. The wealth is too complex and too dynamic. What heirs need alongside the document is a live view of the portfolio: current allocations, historical performance, and the rationale behind significant decisions. Without that context, inheriting the assets means inheriting a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

The Exclusion Problem

The documentation gap is serious. The generational exclusion problem is worse. According to UBS’s 2025 Global Family Office Report, only 26% of family offices consult the next generation about the succession plan from the outset. Three-quarters of heirs are being planned around rather than planned with.

Heirs who have never been shown the portfolio have no reference point for the decisions embedded in it. They do not know why a particular custodian was chosen, why certain asset classes are over- or under-weighted, or what the family’s investment philosophy has been across decades. When they eventually take over governance, they are making decisions without the institutional memory that informed the wealth’s current shape. That is not a preparation problem. It is an information problem.

The Campden Wealth and AlTi Tiedemann Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025 found next-generation education ranking as the single lowest-scoring function across all 15 service areas tracked, with just 29% of family members reporting satisfaction. Nearly half of all family offices (45%) believe their next generation is underprepared for what lies ahead. The dissatisfaction is not primarily about formal financial literacy. Heirs at this wealth level have access to that. The gap is contextual: understanding the specific wealth, its history, its logic, its vulnerabilities. Generic financial education programmes cannot provide that. Only structured access to the actual portfolio does.

The Visibility Imperative

Succession planning, done properly, is not primarily a legal or structural exercise. It is a knowledge transfer.

What activates wills, trusts, and constitutional documents — what makes a succession plan more than an administrative artefact — is information visibility: heirs who can see the wealth they are being asked to steward, understand the decisions embedded in its current form, and engage meaningfully with governance before they are responsible for it.

Visibility does not need to come all at once. Progressive exposure, starting with consolidated portfolio overviews and expanding to include transaction history and governance documents, builds the contextual knowledge no classroom can replicate. The goal is not to hand over the controls. It is to ensure that when the handoff comes, it is not the heir’s first time in the cockpit.

Institutions document investment rationale, governance history, and portfolio performance precisely because transitions should never depend on institutional memory walking out the door. Wealthy families that build the same discipline before the transition begins, rather than scrambling to establish it during one, are the ones most likely to preserve both the wealth and the knowledge behind it.

Takeaway

A prepared heir is one who can engage substantively with questions about allocation, performance, and risk before the handoff. Someone who understands the liquidity position, knows which commitments are approaching critical decision windows, and can hold a governance conversation grounded in the actual portfolio rather than a summary of it. That level of readiness does not come from a document filed in a drawer. It comes from years of structured, progressive access to the wealth itself. The families who get succession right treat it as an education programme with the actual portfolio as the curriculum.

That institutional standard is now achievable for private wealth. The Altoo Wealth Platform provides consolidated visibility across custodians, asset classes, and jurisdictions, with role-based access that can be expanded progressively as next-generation members develop their readiness. The platform consolidates holdings across 3,500+ institutions and 40+ asset types, bankable and non-bankable, into a single Swiss-hosted view, with customisable access permissions that allow families to onboard heirs at the right pace and with the right level of detail. Succession becomes a process of deliberate, structured knowledge transfer rather than an event that catches heirs unprepared.

Contact us for a demonstration to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform turns the information your family has accumulated into the inheritance your heirs actually need.

7 April 2026

Altoo Strengthens Leadership Team to Accelerate Growth

Baar, Switzerland – 01.04.2026: Altoo AG, the provider of the award-winning Altoo Wealth Platform, today announced a strengthening of its executive leadership team to support the company’s continued growth and further expansion.

As part of this evolution, Mr. Achille Deodato has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. He succeeds Ian Keates, who will transition into the role of Deputy CEO and COO/CFO. In his expanded position, Ian Keates will continue to play a pivotal role in driving operational excellence, financial strategy, and execution across the organization.
This leadership enhancement reflects Altoo’s commitment to building on its strong foundation and further scaling its innovative platform, which is trusted by clients for its clarity, security, and comprehensive overview of wealth.

Søren Mose Chairman of Altoo AG said, “Strengthening our leadership team is a natural step as we continue to grow and expand our global footprint. Achille brings valuable experience from multiple aspects of private banking, wealth management, family office business and digital business growth. His fresh and additional perspective will help accelerate our strategic ambitions. Ian’s deep knowledge of the company and his proven track record ensure continuity and operational strength.”

Achille Deodato added, “I am excited to join Altoo at such a dynamic stage in its journey. The company has built a truly differentiated, award-winning solution, and I look forward to working with the talented team to further enhance our offering and deliver exceptional value to our clients worldwide.”

Ian Keates commented, “Altoo has achieved remarkable progress, and I am proud of what we have built together. I look forward to supporting Achille and the broader team in my new role as we continue to scale the business and deliver on our ambitions.”

Altoo’s platform provides a secure and intuitive digital interface that consolidates wealth data into a single, elegant overview and empowering clients to make informed decisions with confidence. The company remains focused on innovation, client-centricity, and expanding its presence in key international markets.

With this strengthened leadership structure, Altoo is well-positioned to accelerate growth, deepen client relationships, and further establish itself as a leading provider of wealth consolidation solutions.

About the Altoo Wealth Platform
The Altoo Wealth Platform is a Swiss-hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) that unifies bankable and non-bankable assets, liabilities, and documents across institutions in a single, clear view, with analysis, performance and fee reporting, collaboration, and “digital lockbox” security. Last year Altoo introduced a next-generation mobile app that clients rate highly for dashboards, quick navigation and search, watchlists, alerts, and on-the-go monitoring. For real-world use cases and factsheets, visit our Resource Center.

About Altoo AG
Altoo AG is a wealth-management fintech headquartered in Baar, Switzerland. Founded in 2017, the company serves clients in more than 20 countries and has been recognized by Forbes among the best digital family office software providers.

Media Contact: press@altoo.io

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Photo of Altoo’s new leadership team: Søren Mose (Chairman of the Board), Achille Deodato (CEO), and Ian Keates (Deputy CEO, COO/CFO).

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7 April 2026

Altoo Strengthens Leadership Team to Accelerate Growth

Altoo’s new leadership structure: Søren Mose (President of the Board), Achille Deodato (CEO) and Ian Keates (Deputy CEO, COO/CFO)

7 April 2026

Family Offices: Your Portfolio Companies Are Redesigning Their Operating Models. Are You?

Operating model redesign has shifted from an exceptional event to a recurring management discipline. McKinsey’s June 2025 survey of 757 senior executives at global companies found that two-thirds had redesigned their operating models within the previous two years, and half planned another redesign within the following two. A companion McKinsey survey of 2,000 executives across 16 sectors found that 79% of those redesigns were completed and implemented. The PwC 29th Annual Global CEO Survey, covering 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries, found that nearly four in ten say their company will not be viable in ten years if it stays on its current path. Operating model reinvention is the primary structural response.

These executives are leading the types of businesses family offices analyse, underwrite, and hold. The question is whether family offices are applying the same rigour to their own operations.

The cost pressure is tangible and rising. J.P. Morgan’s 2026 Global Family Office Report puts the average annual operating cost of a family office managing more than $1 billion at $6.6 million — up from $6.1 million in its 2024 edition. The Campden Wealth and AlTi Tiedemann Global Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025 shows that operating costs average 61 basis points of AUM for smaller family offices, falling to 20 basis points for large ones. The scale effect is real, but it does not arrive automatically. The offices at the lower end of that cost range have not simply grown larger; they have built operating models that do not require proportional increases in headcount to handle proportional increases in complexity.

The Operating Model as Management Discipline

What the McKinsey and PwC data describes is not a response to a crisis. It is a recurring, deliberate practice. The companies in those surveys are redesigning their operating models because they have learned that the allocation of organisational capacity to different types of work requires active maintenance, not passive accumulation.

The discipline rests on a specific distinction between work that requires human judgement and work that requires human execution. Judgement-intensive work (strategy, relationships, decisions under uncertainty, oversight of complex variables) stays with people. Execution-intensive work (data processing, reconciliation, report assembly, transaction logging) is routed to automated systems wherever possible. The allocation is not permanent. As McKinsey’s research documents, it is revisited as technology capabilities evolve and as the volume and complexity of operational tasks changes.

In business model transformations, technology amplifies both good and bad operations. McKinsey, Bain, and Gartner research consistently shows that 70 to 88% of business transformations fail to meet their objectives when technology is deployed into existing processes without first redesigning how work is organised. Organisations that implement technology first and design their operating model around it tend to replicate existing inefficiencies inside a more expensive system. With regards to investment management firms in particular, Deloitte Switzerland suggests that refining the target operating model should not be a one-time exercise but an ongoing process that keeps firms responsive to industry shifts.

The Family Office Reality

The median family office manages more than $1 billion in assets with 11 total staff, according to the UBS Global Family Office Report 2024. That figure covers investment professionals, operations, compliance, client service, and administration combined. Eleven people responsible for functions that a larger institution would support with purpose-built technology and documented process design at each layer.

The same Campden Wealth report confirmed that the pool of qualified candidates for critical roles continues to tighten, and that family offices frequently feel pressure to compromise on hires or scramble when key team members depart unexpectedly. The report describes the resulting dynamic explicitly as a “reactive approach.” It disrupts operations rather than building structural resilience.

The pattern is consistent with what McKinsey’s research documents across large businesses. Organisations that respond to capacity pressure by adding headcount without first asking whether the work itself is properly designed end up with higher fixed costs and the same structural constraints.

The Redesign Principle

Operational leverage does not mean fewer people. It means ensuring that the people a family office employs are deployed against work that actually requires them.

The starting point is a question most family offices have not formally asked: if every hour spent by every professional over the past month were mapped, what proportion of that time was spent on work requiring the judgement they were hired for? Reconciling custodian statements does not require a CIO. Assembling a performance report does not require a portfolio manager. Chasing missing transaction data does not require a senior investment analyst.

State Street’s 2024 Annual Report documents the institutional approach in practice: the firm accelerated its transition to a platform-based operating model in 2024, centralising and standardising key functions to enhance efficiency and interoperability across its business. The result included a documented increase in client satisfaction across multiple dimensions of service — not despite the operational redesign, but because of it. Operational leverage, pursued systematically, does not degrade service quality. It protects the professional capacity that delivers it.

The technology decisions follow from operating model clarity, not the other way around. A family office that knows precisely which operational tasks it wants to remove from its professionals’ workload will make fundamentally different technology choices than one looking for a platform that handles everything and hoping the time savings follow. As McKinsey notes, changing an asset management operating model after changing a technology platform is extremely costly and difficult.

From Operating Cost to Operating Leverage

Many family offices have accumulated processes, tools, and headcount incrementally. They have been responding to immediate capacity problems without stepping back to ask whether the capacity problem itself is the right problem to solve.

The publicly listed companies in most family office portfolios have been working on this question systematically. They have learned that treating the allocation of organisational capacity as a managed variable — not an outcome of hiring decisions — is the difference between scaling efficiently and scaling expensively. A family office that applies the same logic — asking not “do we have enough people?” but “are our people working on the right things?” — is already thinking differently about its own cost structure.

Purpose-built wealth technology solutions like the Altoo Wealth Platform automate high-volume, low-judgement operational tasks to make a redesigned operating model achievable.

Altoo automates data import and reconciliation across more than 3,500 custodian connections, handles data cleansing and validation as a standing service commitment rather than a user responsibility, and manages institutional account connections on behalf of the family office. Professional staff no longer have the bureaucratic burden of data entry and manual calculations. The technology handles the execution-intensive work and professionals are protected for the judgement-intensive work they were hired to do.

Contact us for a demonstration to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform can help your family office build an operating model to fit your ambitions.

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Adopted but Not Activated: The Family Office Governance Problem

The Adoption Picture

The Activation Gap

What Living Governance Looks Like

The Visibility Condition

The Activation Layer

Succession Planning’s Missing Ingredient: Visibility

Documentation Is Necessary but Not Sufficient

The Exclusion Problem

The Visibility Imperative

Takeaway

Altoo Strengthens Leadership Team to Accelerate Growth

Altoo Strengthens Leadership Team to Accelerate Growth

Family Offices: Your Portfolio Companies Are Redesigning Their Operating Models. Are You?

The Operating Model as Management Discipline

The Family Office Reality

The Redesign Principle

From Operating Cost to Operating Leverage

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