Family offices rarely redesign their operations all at once. A new asset class adds another data source, a new entity brings its own accounting and reporting requirements, and a process that worked well for a small team becomes harder to manage as responsibilities grow. Most offices absorb each change by extending the tools and processes already in place. Each adjustment makes sense on its own, but together they can leave the office relying on systems and workflows built for a very different set of needs.

That gap between growing complexity and the infrastructure supporting it framed the conversations at Archway’s Immersion Lite 2026 client events, held October 21 in Dallas and October 27 in New York City. Clients and industry peers joined Archway’s senior leadership, Client Services, and Product teams to discuss the challenges facing family offices today and where Archway is investing across its platform to help address them.

The program also included Industry Insights, a conversation between Archway CEO Anthony Abenante and Chris Dickson, who leads RSM’s family office advisory practice. We will cover that discussion in its own article later in this series. Across the rest of the program, one question kept coming up: how can a family office build an operating foundation that keeps pace with the family as its needs change? Five themes came through clearly.

1. Family Office Operations Need a Foundation That Keeps Pace with the Family

Most family offices rely on some combination of accounting systems, investment reporting tools, banking platforms, spreadsheets, and outside service providers. Each may serve its purpose well, yet moving and reconciling information between them can become a significant part of the daily workload. A new system or process may solve the immediate problem while leaving the broader operation no more connected or easier to scale.

Abenante opened the program by describing the “SaaS sprawl” many offices now manage, with separate tools for portfolio management, risk, accounting, alternative investment operations, lifestyle management, and travel and expense. When point systems do not communicate well, teams end up moving information by hand between screens and find it harder to trust that they are working from a single, reliable source of data. Archway does not try to be all things to everyone. Its role is to serve as a platform with a general ledger at its core, supporting reporting, expense management, and bill pay, and connecting with the other systems and providers a family office already relies on.

In Archway in Transition: Setting the Foundation for the Future, COO Ethan Wishnick and CTO Dan Berg described the work behind that vision. Much of the past year went into changes clients may never see directly. These included moving the platform to the cloud following Archway’s separation from its former parent company, strengthening information security monitoring, and hiring specialists in accounting, performance reporting, data architecture, user experience, and security. The goal was to complete this foundational work with minimal disruption, so Archway can continue to deliver improvements without asking clients to rebuild how they work or retrain their teams.

The larger point is that a family office’s operating model should be evaluated as a whole. The office needs technology that supports accounting, investment decisions, cash activity, reporting, and service requirements together, even when different teams rely on different tools.

2. Better Decisions Start with Reliable, Connected Data

Managing a constant flow of financial information from different sources presents its own challenges for family offices. Banks, custodians, investment managers, and accounting systems each bring different formats, reporting standards, and timelines. Bringing that information together is an important first step, but ensuring the data is understood, validated, and consistently maintained over time is what makes it reliable.

At its core, Archway is a data platform. What matters most is how data comes in, how it is processed, how accurate it is, and how easily clients can get it back out. A major part of Archway’s current work is modernizing components of the platform for analytics, reporting, and data exchange, starting with the speed and breadth of investment and performance reporting. Alongside that, new work to normalize messy structured and unstructured data as it arrives reflects a basic principle: a system of record is only as useful as the accuracy of the data in it.

These challenges become most acute when a team needs a consolidated view across multiple entities. When different workflows rely on different versions of the same information, staff spend more time checking numbers and tracing discrepancies and less time understanding what the numbers mean. A connected approach does not remove the need for oversight, but it gives the team a better place to start, with clearer data flows, more consistent records, and greater confidence in the figures behind reporting and decisions. That holds whether the office is reviewing daily cash activity, preparing financial statements, or assessing investment exposure.

3. Family Office Reporting Works Best When It Fits the Person Using It

Access to information is only part of the reporting challenge. A family office may need entity-level accounting detail for its finance team, consolidated investment information for leadership, and a clear financial overview for family members. Good reporting should make each of those views possible without multiplying manual work.

That idea ran through Small Releases, Big Details: Practical Tips and Easily Overlooked Features, led by Archway’s Client Services team leaders. They walked through enhancements that make financial information easier to reach and act on. One example was new cash overviews at both the entity and enterprise level, which bring bank and portfolio cash, currency breakouts, and balance alerts together in one place and let users drill into the underlying transactions without running a separate report.

The Client Portal, relaunched in June, shows how quickly client feedback now shapes the product. Clients asked for more choice, so Archway added measures such as unfunded commitments and multiple on invested capital (MOIC) and gave administrators control over which metrics appear. Since its relaunch, the portal has continued to receive regular enhancements.

4. AI and Innovation Start with Trusted Data and Usability

Artificial intelligence came up throughout the day, and Archway’s leaders consistently brought it back to practical use. Berg said Archway will avoid superficial AI use cases “that demo really well but add no client value,” and that information security and data hygiene will not be traded away in the process. That focus matters as more family offices ask detailed questions about how AI models are governed and where their data goes.

The most concrete applications center on unstructured data. Family offices receive a large volume of information as PDFs, from alternative investment documents to vendor invoices, and capturing it has traditionally meant manual data entry, with the delays and errors that come with it. Archway is applying automated extraction to this work, including Smart AP Capture for bills and invoices, scheduled for Archway’s November release. Instead of keying in each invoice, users review and confirm information the system has already extracted.

In Innovation: How the Platform Is Evolving for Today and Tomorrow, Head of Product David O’Kane explained how the Product team decides what to build. Product and development teams are now organized around specific domains and initiatives. They draw on several sources of input, including client conversations, Archway’s first Net Promoter Score survey, and platform usage analytics that show where users run into friction. The approach starts from what the user is trying to accomplish, including simplifying navigation so each menu item ties to a specific workflow. O’Kane also previewed early prototypes of new ways to work with data, such as asking questions in plain English and building custom reports without a separate request.

For family office teams who spend much of the day in their systems, this carries real weight. A feature can be technically impressive and still add little if it does not help someone complete a real task more clearly, quickly, or consistently.

5. Small Releases Can Make a Real Difference in Everyday Work

One line from the program captured a central message of the day: “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” Archway is on pace for the most releases in a single year in recent history, so improvements reach clients sooner and continue to be refined after release. For the Product team, a launch is the starting point. The new AP module, released in September, has already received numerous enhancements within just the last month and a half.

The Client Service team showed what that looks like day to day. Expanded cash workspaces let users review balances across entities, view currency details, and move directly into related activity. Users can also start a spot trade from the cash overview, and the system creates the journal entry automatically. The team shared the example of a client who needed to convert several foreign currency balances to U.S. dollars and did not realize this option was now available.

Other updates were smaller still but add up for teams managing many entities. When a user creates a new entity by copying an existing one, its notification rules, approval rules, and user group access carry over automatically. Redesigned screens for transfers and gifting and for portfolio setup cut down on clicks and help prevent downstream data issues.

Any single release may look modest, but the features delivered over the past 15 months add up to a substantial body of work. The foreign currency example points to the other half of the job: a feature only creates value once people know it exists and how to use it. That is why Archway continues to look for better ways to help clients discover what is already in the platform and put it to work.

Continuing the Conversation

The program closed on a simple message: Archway is not done yet. Across both cities and every session, the priorities were consistent: reliable data, connected workflows, usability, and close attention to what clients tell us.

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Dallas and New York City, asked questions, and shared feedback with our team. Those conversations are an important part of how we continue to improve our platform, services, and client experience.

Over the coming weeks, we will share articles that go deeper into individual sessions, including Industry Insights with RSM. If your family office is weighing how well its current systems and processes will hold up as complexity grows, explore the Archway platform or schedule a conversation with our team.