As financiers and dynasts gather at London’s Mansion House for the inaugural Global Family Office Summit, the mood is one of apprehensive calculation.
EXANTE, a global prime broker, has chosen the occasion to unveil its latest white paper, Global Family Office Review 2025: Navigating the Future of Private Capital and the Family Office. Authored by Renée Friedman, the firm’s head of research, it argues that the year ahead marks a decisive moment for family offices worldwide.
The reasons are familiar, yet their convergence is new: geopolitical shockwaves, fresh tax regimes, and the onset of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. Together, they threaten to upend the conservative formulas that have guided family offices for decades.
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The numbers are eye-catching. Some $83trn in assets are expected to change hands over the next quarter-century. Inheritance-tax reforms, including Britain’s changes last October, will further reshape portfolios. Family offices, often caricatured as cautious guardians of dynastic capital, are being pushed to rethink how and where they deploy money.
The strain is already visible in asset classes once deemed safe. From government bonds to prime London property, stability has given way to uncertainty. Eighty-four per cent of family offices surveyed cite geopolitics as their single greatest concern. Tariffs, sanctions and protectionist policies are forcing them to hedge not just currency and credit, but politics itself.
That helps explain the dash into alternatives. According to EXANTE’s research, 86 per cent of family offices now invest in artificial intelligence in some form, and a third hold crypto assets — an allocation once unthinkable, now legitimised by clearer regulatory regimes in the US, EU and Britain. Diversification, long a mantra, is becoming more radical.
Britain finds itself at an awkward juncture
The government’s abolition of non-domicile status and changes to inheritance tax are prompting family offices to reconsider their structures and even their locations. Looming fiscal tightening in November’s budget may accelerate that reassessment. “The traditional playbook for family wealth no longer applies,” argues Friedman. “Geopolitical volatility, tax shocks, and rapid technological disruption mean family offices must reassess everything from portfolio diversification to succession governance — or risk being left behind.”
Yet the report is not entirely gloomy. It sees scope for resilience, particularly through partnerships with regulated, globally connected platforms such as EXANTE, which promise efficient access to both traditional and alternative assets across multiple jurisdictions. In theory, such platforms offer families the nimbleness to withstand sudden jolts.
London, for its part, is keen to keep its crown as a magnet for private wealth. Alastair King, the city’s Lord Mayor, used the summit to trumpet the role family offices play in funnelling capital into British start-ups — nearly a third of the venture-capital market. “We are entering a new chapter,” he said, “defined by shifting regulations, global uncertainty, economic turbulence and rapid tech transformation.”
The summit, he added, was conceived to keep Britain competitive in a financial world where capital is footloose and policy fickle.
For now, family offices straddle continuity and change. Their fortunes may rest less on the rituals of wealth preservation and more on their willingness to adapt — by taking risks in AI, by accepting crypto, or by rethinking where “home” ought to be. The $83trn question is whether they can evolve swiftly enough.
