While family offices perform a myriad of functions, their primary purpose is to manage the complex financial lives of the families they serve. One key activity they perform is ensuring that the families’ bills are paid accurately, on time, and with appropriate oversight and safeguards.

Bill payment and related treasury functions often receive less attention than investment strategy, estate planning, philanthropy, or family governance. All too often, cash and expense management activities are under-resourced, rely on outmoded or point-solution technology, and can be prone to errors or worse.

Bill pay often gains executive attention only when something goes wrong, such as when the office receives a call from a family member about a missed or incorrect payment. This lack of focus, however, belies its importance. The downstream effects are real: missed or incorrect payments can impact a family member’s plans, trigger penalties, and damage credit relationships. Poor transaction oversight can expose a family member to fraud. The lack of coordination with a comprehensive treasury and accounting function can lead to overdrafts, duplicate payments, and late fees. Poor documentation hinders oversight and reporting and can complicate tax and audit preparation. Current approaches may lack scalability and redundancy and may not meet operational demands as family wealth structures grow more complex. As the number of entities grow and the volume and variety of invoices multiply, staff can quickly become overwhelmed.

This article examines the key challenges family offices face in managing bill payments and cash management, the risks created by inadequate processes and technology, and the principles and approaches that family offices need to adopt to modernize this important function.

Why Family Office Bill Pay Is So Complex

In most instances, family offices are managing payments for multiple entities in an ecosystem of fragmented financial interests and structures. A typical ultra-high-net-worth family may hold assets and require disbursements through a combination of the following:

• Personal residences and vacation properties in multiple states or countries

• Revocable and irrevocable trusts for estate planning purposes

• Family limited partnerships and limited liability companies  

• Private foundations and donor-advised funds

• Operating businesses and holding companies

• Investment accounts and special purpose vehicles

The personal lifestyles of individual family members also generate a broad array of recurring and, at times, irregular payment obligations, including:

• Property management and related fees across multiple residences

• Household staff payroll, benefits, and employment taxes

• One-time or periodic purchases of luxury items: cars, aircraft, art, and yachts

• Luxury asset maintenance

• Personal security services

• Educational expenses  

• Medical concierge services and ongoing healthcare

• Subscriptions, memberships, and club dues

• Family member-specific tax obligations

• Charitable pledges and recurring donations

• Capital call obligations for private fund investments

It is easy to see how quickly the payment environment can become complex as each payment category involves different vendors, payment frequencies, levels of urgency, approval processes, and sources of funds. Invoices must be paid for by the correct entity and from the correct bank account. Some family members or entities may have their own bank account, payment obligations, and accounting requirements. Others may simplify the process by paying invoices from one entity and allocating expenses across the partnership structure through the accounting process. All of this needs to be reconciled across multiple transactions, statements and recorded in the accounting system.

Complexity increases when families maintain residences, businesses, and service relationships across multiple jurisdictions. This can result in invoices in multiple currencies, international wire transfers, currency conversion, correspondent banking fees, and cross-border compliance requirements, adding another layer of complexity to the bill pay process.

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Operational Challenges

Legacy family offices may rely on less formalized or consistently documented processes. Invoices arrive through multiple channels, often in hard copy, including paper mail, email, vendor portals, and property management systems. Invoices are often handled in hard copy with little tracking or workflow management. It is easy to make duplicate payments when invoices are received through multiple channels and processed independently. Misplaced invoices and missed payments can also arise when invoices fall through communication gaps or are simply lost.

Expense approval and oversight can be haphazard. Family offices typically maintain payment approval thresholds, with amounts below which staff can authorize payments independently and amounts above which principal or trustee approval is required. In practice, these frameworks are frequently informal and inconsistently applied, lacking approval documentation, tracking capabilities, and an audit trail.

Many family offices use spreadsheets, small business accounting software, or a combination of the two to manage their bill payment process. While flexible and familiar, spreadsheets present fundamental limitations for payment management, including:

• Poor spreadsheet access controls can allow any user with file access to alter payment data without an audit trail.

• The lack of version management can result in staff working from outdated files, creating conflicting records.

• There is little workflow to support the end-to-end process.

• Manual data entry can lead to errors.

• There is little system integration, with data manually entered into other recordkeeping and accounting systems, creating redundant work that is time-consuming and may diverge from the official books and records.

Many accounting platforms pose their own set of challenges. They are not designed for family office complexity and may lack integration among payment processing, cash reconciliation, and the general ledger. Workarounds that allow these platforms to approximate family office requirements can create duplicative processing and reconciliation of data between systems, increasing the risk of errors. In addition, they have significant reporting limitations that require manual effort to overcome.

Finally, a key challenge is the lack of staff redundancy. Family offices frequently have lean staffing models. Often, this complex process relies on a single employee or a handful of employees. If someone leaves or is unavailable, this can create a gap in the bill-paying process.  

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Coordination with Treasury Functions

Communication and coordination with treasury functions present another challenge. Once an invoice is approved for payment, the treasury function must be notified of the correct bank account and the amount of the payment. Treasury must then review relevant banking details to ensure adequate funds are available to meet the obligation. Treasury then notifies the bill pay team to execute the transaction. Without a robust workflow and platform, this process often relies on email and callbacks and is prone to errors.

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Fraud Prevention Can Be Weak

Not surprisingly, family offices are potential targets for financial fraud. The combination of substantial assets, lean staffing, informal processes, and lack of systemic controls can create an environment that sophisticated fraudsters can easily exploit.

One approach is known as a Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack. Fraudsters compromise or spoof the email account of a trusted party — a property manager, investment manager, attorney, or one of the principals themselves — and issue fraudulent invoices or payment instructions to family office staff.

A vendor impersonation scheme is another fraudster favorite. A fraudster monitors family office communications and business relationships to learn of important vendor relationships. In a typical vendor impersonation scheme, attackers send invoices using spoofed or lookalike domains that closely resemble legitimate vendors, request bank account changes for future payments, and exploit informal vendor management practices that lack verification protocols. Without fraud detection and prevention processes, it is easy for busy staff to miss fraudulent activity.

Family offices are also not immune from internal fraud. They often operate with insufficient segregation of duties in their payment functions. A single employee may have authority to add new vendors, initiate payments, and reconcile bank accounts — three functions that should ideally be performed by separate individuals to create appropriate segregation of duties and oversight.

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New Solutions and Best Practices

Leading family offices are addressing these challenges by taking a fresh approach to bill pay and the broader cash and expense management process. Through a combination of technology, organizational design, workflow tools, process discipline, and outsourcing to a third party, they are adding significant scale, efficiency, and safeguards.

Purpose-built family office bill payment platforms can now provide capabilities specifically designed for the multi-entity, multi-bank, multi-currency environment. These platforms consolidate and digitize invoice receipt and capture and allow for invoice tracking and multi-tier approvals with complete audit trails. They enable payment execution across multiple payment entities, automatic reconciliation with accounting systems, and consolidated reporting across all entities. Also included are important aspects of the treasury function to ensure funds are available to meet obligations and payments are made from the correct accounts. By outsourcing this function, a family office can gain access to a best-of-class technology platform and achieve scalability and personnel redundancy.  

Key Components of a Modern Bill Pay Workflow

Whether managed internally or with an outsourced partner, a modern family office bill pay workflow should include the following components.

How Archway Can Help

Bill payment management sits at an unusual intersection in the family office: it is operationally essential yet often organizationally undervalued, technically complex yet frequently entrusted to informal processes, and financially significant yet rarely properly resourced.  

Archway’s Cash and Expense Management solution addresses the treasury, accounting, and bill pay needs of complex family offices. Our secure, permission-based platform manages the full operational lifecycle of the payment process, from invoice receipt and approval through payment generation, reconciliation, general ledger integration, and reporting. Clients can delegate the full process to the Archway team or retain control over selected activities, including approvals and fund disbursements.

Recognizing the value of an enterprise-grade treasury and accounts payable platform can achieve more timely bill payment, better cash management, more accurate reporting, stronger fraud detection, and a more efficient payment process.

Why Financial Institutions and Family Offices Are Adopting Outsourced Accounting and Investment Reporting Solutions to Serve Their Ultra High-Net-Worth Clients.

In some corners of the private wealth management world, the word outsourcing, sometimes referred to as business process outsourcing (BPO), has become taboo. Oftentimes considered synonymous with offshoring, outsourcing has erroneously been painted as cheap work performed by unskilled labor.

But it only takes a bit of due diligence to find that these negative connotations are often an inaccurate portrayal of the true value of an outsourced service offering.

To that end, like other outsourced service providers to family offices and financial institutions, Archway is frequently faced with questions about our people, our processes and our technology and, ultimately, why outsourcing may be the right solution.

To help answer this question, here are 10 reasons private wealth managers are leaning into outsourced services.

1. They enable you to grow, quickly.

A new advisor joins your firm and brings a dozen new clients into the firm. Is your team prepared to absorb the account aggregation and report preparation responsibilities that will soon follow?

When you’re in high growth mode, the last thing you want to do is realize your team is not equipped to scale. An outsourced service provider like Archway can help financial institutions and family offices smoothly onboard new clients or households, so that wealth managers can focus on helping their clients achieve their wealth goals.

2. They can enhance your quality of service.

Enhanced service quality tops the list and it’s quite a simple notion.

Instead of spending time normalizing data, performing consolidations, paying bills or preparing and reviewing report packages, private wealth managers can focus on their passion: serving their clients and delivering results that build client wealth.

3. They provide business continuity in the event of disaster or significant change.

We’ve learned some tough lessons throughout the pandemic, but one that stands out for businesses is strengthening their ability to overcome disruption. Whether you’re trying to minimize the effects of a health crisis, employee departures or just a simple power outage, having a dependable outsourced service partner helps ensure that you can continue to meet the demands and expectations of your clients despite forces beyond your control.

4. They offer workforce stability in the face of employee turnover.

Key person risk is one of the chief concerns amongst family offices and financial institutions. If an employee departs or a position needs to be eliminated, how do you ensure that your operations don’t falter?

From our vantage point, outsourced service providers should operate as a seamless extension of your internal team. Using operational documentation, thorough communication and repeatable processes, an outsourced service team can quickly take on additional responsibilities in the absence of key personnel.

5. They are built on operational expertise.

There’s an adage that says, “You can be great at one thing or good at many.” We believe that you should always strive for greatness, which may mean leveraging third-party resources to perform key tasks that sit outside of your expertise or aren’t a valuable use of your time.

By partnering with an experienced BPO team, you will be able to work with subject matter experts and highly-skilled operations professionals that are solely focused on a single function. Examples of commonly outsourced activities include portfolio reconciliation and consolidated investment reporting, personal expense management, tax preparation, partnership administration, legal services, and trust administration.

6. They help you manage risk.

In some cases, particularly amongst private banks and other financial institutions, there may be compliance requirements related to particular service offerings that necessitate the need for third-party oversight. This oftentimes translates to creating a business relationship with an outsourced service provider.

Financial institutions and family offices can further manage their risk exposure by establishing service-level agreements (SLAs) with outsourced service providers that help define the who, what and when of service delivery.

7. They allow you to customize your solutions offering.

We’ve all watched this scene play out before: you’re courting a new client who presents a unique set of wealth management demands and you need to spin up a new solution offering quickly. It can be an anxiety-inducing situation if you don’t already know what’s out there.

On the other hand, if your financial institution or family office has a pre-established relationship with an outsourced service partner, it’s much easier to explore other available services and expand your relationship on an as-needed basis. Additionally, you can craft tiered service offerings that span the range of your clientele to ensure you’re delivering the right solutions to the right clients.

8. They provide efficiencies in your back office.

Most outsourced services focus on one of two areas: highly repetitive processes or highly specialized processes. The common thread between these two areas is that they both require a significant amount of time to complete.

By allowing an outsourced service team to absorb click-heavy, recurring operations like portfolio reconciliation, or time-consuming, tedious operations like family office partnership accounting, your staff can focus on doing what they do best and not worry about the monotony of data.

9. They can offer access to purpose-built technology.

While some envision BPO firms as shops filled with endless rows of desks and people, the reality is that most outsourced service organizations rely on a key tool to help drive efficiency: specialized technology.

At Archway, our BPO teams use our proprietary family office software, the Archway Platform℠, to perform the nuanced operations that exist within family offices and financial institutions serving high-net-worth clients.

Then, using the Archway Client Portal, we can securely deliver the processed and formatted data to family office professionals, advisors and their end-clients in an intuitive, easy-to-use platform. This gives them the opportunity to engage with their financial information in an interactive, tech-forward way that may not exist if the family office was exclusively responsible for designing and developing the end-client reporting experience.

10. They can reduce your firm’s overhead costs.

Maintaining technology can be expensive, especially if you are the designer, developer, quality assurer and information systems architect.

An outsourced service partner alleviates the need to maintain the technology and the servers that run it, which can ultimately reduce your overhead IT costs. As both an experienced technology firm and an award-winning outsourcing provider, our services include hosting and server maintenance, data backup and disaster recovery, ongoing technology enhancements, software quality assurance, data collection and normalization, system connectivity troubleshooting, and product documentation and training.

We know that outsourcing doesn’t always receive the recognition and appreciation it deserves, but the benefits of partnering with an outsourced service provider are demonstrated to be plentiful for private wealth management firms.

Whether you are seeking to ease the burden of client reporting, add new concierge services like client bill payment or offload the complex process of private fund bookkeeping and reporting, Archway is prepared to work and grow alongside your firm.

Check out our full suite of technology and outsourced service solutions for family offices and financial institutions to find out how we can help you better serve your high-net-worth clients.

A Look at 4 Key Areas of Strategic Focus Expected in 2023

As the end of the year looms near, so do project deadlines, final data reviews, and annual reporting deliverables. With family offices bogged down by the mechanics of reconciliations and closing the year-end books, strategic planning can unintentionally get pushed to the bottom of the pile.

But whether strategy is top of mind or not, the family office space is in flux—changing now more than ever—which warrants consideration of several key focus areas.

Outsourcing

Continuing a multi-year conversation, outsourcing has been a trending topic in the market for some time now. With more family offices reviewing internal operations and a growing appetite amongst financial institutions to offer a more holistic set of services to its ultra-high-net-worth clients, we at Archway Family Office Services believe outsourcing will continue to be the centerfold in the ongoing assessment of operations and resources.

Employed as a long-term strategy or as a trusted stopgap during unanticipated events, outsourced services can create meaningful capacity within family offices. Although family office outsourcing is often synonymous with professional services like tax and regulatory compliance or cybersecurity, it can also be impactful in core operational areas like data aggregation and reconciliation, partnership administration, and routine reporting.

Process automation

When the Archway Platform℠ was introduced in the early 2000s, it offered family offices the opportunity to automate the manual ticking and tying of prior decades. It offered automated data aggregation and the creation of financial statements and client reports. It offered automated partnership allocations, investment performance calculations, bill payment, and more. And all of this automation offered family offices something they’d long been after: Time.

Now 20 years later, countless technology solutions have been introduced to automate family office functions from A to Z, each offering a new layer of efficiency—and potentially adding hours back into the work week for family office professionals.

Enhanced analytics

Ultra-high-net-worth investors and next gen wealth owners are clamoring for data. They want more transparency, deeper insights, and a higher probability of success. For family office professionals, this translates into looking beyond traditional performance measurements and delivering enhanced analysis across a variety of metrics and results like attribution, benchmarking, value-at-risk, stress testing, exposure mapping, and what-if scenarios.

Entity and tax restructuring

While most family offices don’t endeavor to restructure every single year, certain events can lead to this conversation taking a front row seat during annual strategic planning. Impending tax laws, new regulations, and political posturing can all lead to an evaluation of a family office’s structure. But so can major changes to the nuclear family like deaths, births, divorces, or marriages.

As family offices and their tax attorneys consider tax advantages and implications, entity restructuring can help families weather the changes—political, social, environmental, or personal.

At Archway Family Office Services, we can’t overstate the importance of having the right family office software in place to manage the restructure, automate asset transfers, define new ownership, and validate the changes through reporting. With the help of the right tools, family offices can make the restructuring process feel nearly seamless—or at least as seamless as restructuring goes.

While it’s likely that your to-do list is long and the countdown to the New Year is short, we encourage family offices and advisors to high-net-worth clients to spend some time reviewing the outcomes of the past year and strategizing for the next.