Data Alone Isn’t Enough: The Next Stage of AI Readiness

Earlier in this series, we discussed why “having good data” is one of the most important first steps in any artificial intelligence strategy. Clean, accurate, and organized information creates the foundation AI systems rely on to generate meaningful insights and support better decision-making.

However, data quality is only one piece of the equation. For Family Offices and wealth management organizations, AI success also depends on the infrastructure, governance, integrations, and operational processes surrounding that data. Even strong datasets can create challenges when information is fragmented across systems, managed inconsistently, or difficult to access in real time.

The next stage of AI readiness is about creating an environment where data can move efficiently, securely, and intelligently across the organization. In this article, we’ll explore what that looks like in practice and why operational readiness is becoming just as important as data quality itself.

Phase 1: Data Governance and Stewardship

Effective data management requires clear governance structures that define roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority. Who owns the data? Who is responsible for data quality and integrity? Who approves sensitive data access requests? Who sets data retention policies? Clear answers to these questions are essential.

In family offices, governance is further complicated by the involvement of multiple stakeholders: family members, investment staff, external advisors, and service providers, each of whom may have different views on data priorities, privacy requirements, and acceptable uses. Establishing and maintaining consensus requires active governance mechanisms.

For AI specifically, governance policies must address additional questions: What data can be used for model training? How should models be validated before deployment? What level of human oversight is required for AI-generated recommendations? How are model decisions documented and explained? Who can deploy new AI capabilities?

Governance must also extend to third-party service providers. How are they using your data? What safeguards are they maintaining, particularly for the most sensitive information?

Phase 2: Foundation Building

Before deploying sophisticated AI capabilities, family offices must establish solid data foundations. This phase focuses on four priorities:

• Comprehensive data inventory. Catalog all data sources, document their contents and update frequencies, identify gaps and quality issues, and map data flows between systems. This baseline understanding clarifies what data resources exist and where improvement is needed.
• Data consolidation. Deploy a data lake or similar solution to create a unified view of family office assets and eliminate siloed information.
• Data quality processes. Implement validation rules, exception reporting, and correction workflows. Define data ownership and accountability. Establish metrics for measuring quality and track improvements over time.
• Data catalogs. As data ecosystems grow in complexity, the ability to find and understand available data becomes critical. Data catalogs inventory available datasets, document their contents and lineage, and facilitate discovery. For AI implementations, they help data scientists identify relevant datasets, support model debugging, and facilitate impact analysis when data sources change. Maintaining comprehensive data catalogs, however, requires dedicated effort and appropriate tooling.
  
  

Phase 3: Targeted AI Pilots

With foundational data infrastructure in place, family offices can begin experimenting with AI through targeted pilot projects. Pilots serve multiple purposes: demonstrating value, building internal expertise, uncovering unforeseen challenges, and refining implementation approaches.

Successful pilots share common characteristics. They address well-defined problems with measurable outcomes, leverage data that is already relatively clean and accessible, have executive sponsorship and appropriate resources, and include mechanisms for capturing lessons learned.

Example pilot projects might include:

• Portfolio rebalancing optimization using machine learning to minimize tax impact
• Document processing automation for extracting data from fund statements or K-1 tax forms
• Anomaly detection for identifying unusual transactions or market movements
• Natural language processing for analyzing investment research reports or earnings call transcripts
  
  

Phase 4: Scaling and Integration

Successful pilots provide the foundation for broader AI adoption. The scaling phase focuses on expanding AI capabilities across additional use cases, integrating AI insights into decision-making workflows, and building organizational muscle memory for maintaining and improving AI systems.

This phase requires balancing expansion with sustainability. Adding new AI capabilities without corresponding investments in data infrastructure, governance, and talent can produce poor results. Successful scaling requires disciplined program management, continued focus on data quality, and ongoing capability development.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Start with Data, Not Algorithms

The allure of sophisticated AI models can tempt organizations to prematurely focus on algorithm selection and model development. Resist this temptation. No algorithm, however advanced, can compensate for poor-quality or inaccessible data. Invest first in data infrastructure, quality, and governance, including the unglamorous but essential work of data cleaning, standardization, and consolidation.

Embrace Incremental Progress

Transformative AI capabilities are built incrementally, not through sweeping all-at-once implementations. Start with focused projects that deliver tangible value quickly, use early wins to build momentum and secure resources, and iterate based on experience. This approach reduces risk, facilitates learning, and maintains stakeholder engagement.

Build Privacy and Security In

Security and privacy cannot be afterthoughts. Design data architectures with privacy preservation from the outset. Implement encryption, access controls, and audit logging while consistently evaluating outside vendors rigorously on their security practices.

Develop Governance and Internal Capabilities

Establish a clear governance structure and processes early. Invest in internal capabilities through hiring, training, and hands-on experience. Even small family offices can cultivate basic data literacy and AI fluency among existing staff; internal expertise enables more effective vendor management and supports long-term sustainability.

Measure and Monitor

Establish metrics for evaluating AI initiatives. Track data quality indicators, model performance, user adoption rates, and business impact. Regular monitoring surfaces issues early, supports continuous improvement, and demonstrates value to stakeholders. What gets measured gets managed, and that principle extends to third-party providers as well.

Build vs. Buy

Organizations must determine the right approach to their data management challenges. Building internal capabilities offers control and customization but requires significant investment. Purchasing packaged solutions from third-party providers can enable faster, more cost-effective deployment but may sacrifice flexibility. A hybrid approach, combining in-house capabilities with external service providers, potentially guided by consultants or advisors, is another viable path. The right choice depends on organizational size, available resources, and technology sophistication.

How Archway Can Help

The data challenges described in this post are precisely the problems the Archway Platform was designed to solve. For nearly 25 years, Archway has helped family offices and financial institutions aggregate, consolidate, standardize, and manage their key financial data and documents.

The Archway Platform addresses core data readiness challenges in several ways:

• Consolidated data in a single environment. The platform brings together accounting and investment data across custodians, asset classes, and currencies, eliminating the fragmented, multi-silo environments. With a single, reconciled source of financial truth, AI tools have the clean, comprehensive dataset they need to function effectively.
• Structured, auditable financial data. Archway's foundational general ledger automatically books journal entries as transactions are processed, producing well-labeled, consistently formatted data as a natural byproduct of normal operations, exactly what AI systems require.
• Alternative investment data ingestion. Through ingestion tools and partnerships with companies like Canoe Intelligence and Arch, the platform streamlines the extraction and processing of alternative investment data. Capital calls, distribution notices, K-1s, and fund statements are among the most persistent data gaps for family offices seeking AI-ready data, and they are handled more efficiently within the platform.
• Built for complexity and scale. The platform is designed for the unique demands of UHNW family offices, including multi-entity structures, multi-generational ownership, and multi-asset portfolios. As data needs grow, the platform scales with them.

For family offices looking to build the data foundation that makes AI possible, Archway provides both the technology and operational support to get there.

Artificial Intelligence will reshape wealth management, but the firms that benefit most will be those building to enable it. That means investing in the data infrastructure, governance, and processes outlined throughout this series, not just pursuing AI on its own.

The question is not whether AI will transform the industry. It will. The more important question is which organizations will be ready to harness it effectively.

In a previous post, Catherine Fankhauser, Partner and Practice Leader of Family Office Advisory Services at Ernst & Young (EY), joined our CEO, Anthony Abenante, to outline five steps Family Offices should take when starting an AI journey. "Having good data" topped the list. In this post, I want to go deeper on what that means in practice.

AI Demands Better Data

Artificial intelligence represents more than an incremental technology upgrade, it offers a fundamental transformation in how family offices can operate. Advanced AI systems promise capabilities that were once the stuff of science fiction: real-time portfolio optimization across all asset classes, predictive analytics for market movements and liquidity needs, automated compliance monitoring, intelligent tax optimization, and natural language interfaces for complex financial queries, analysis, and reporting.

These capabilities, however, are built on a foundation of quality data. Unlike traditional software that can function on partial or inconsistent inputs, AI systems depend fundamentally on comprehensive, well-structured, and properly labeled datasets. The AI readiness gap facing family offices is therefore not primarily about AI technology itself -- it is about the underlying data infrastructure required to make AI effective.

The Data Challenges Facing Family Offices are Unique

Family offices differ from other financial organizations in four critical ways, and understanding these differences is essential to addressing their data challenges:

• Diverse asset portfolios. Family offices manage holdings that extend well beyond public securities to include private equity, real estate, hedge funds, collectibles, family businesses, and other alternative investments. Each asset class generates different types of data with varying levels of reporting frequency, standardization, and transparency.
• Multiple external service providers. Family offices typically work with custodians, prime brokers, fund administrators, tax advisors, and legal counsel, each maintaining separate data systems with different formats and update frequencies. This creates a naturally fragmented data environment where consolidation is a persistent challenge.
• Sensitive family information. Beyond financial assets, family offices manage estate plans, philanthropic activities, and personal data that require strict confidentiality. These privacy requirements can conflict with the data aggregation and sharing mechanisms that AI systems typically rely on.
• Wide variation in size and sophistication. Many single-family offices operate with lean teams and limited technology resources, making large-scale data initiatives especially challenging.

Fragmentation: The Core Data Problem

The most pervasive data challenge facing family offices is fragmentation. Investment holdings data are frequently dispersed across an array of disconnected systems, creating several problems for AI implementation. Machine learning algorithms require integrated datasets to identify patterns and generate insights and when data resides in isolated silos, AI systems lose the holistic view essential for meaningful analysis.

Data silos also increase the risk of inconsistency and duplication. The same investment may be recorded differently across systems, which confuses AI models and can lead to erroneous conclusions.

The Multi-Custodian Problem

Many family offices maintain relationships with multiple custodians to access specialized services, manage counterparty risk, or accommodate the preferences of individual family members. While this diversification offers operational benefits, it significantly complicates data management.

Historical Data Gaps

AI and machine learning models typically require substantial historical data to train effectively and identify meaningful patterns. Family offices may have years of investment history, but accessing that data in structured, usable formats is often difficult. Legacy systems may have been replaced, historical records may exist only on paper or in PDFs, and data standards may have shifted over time.

Even when historical data exists electronically, it may rely on outdated categorizations or lack key fields needed for modern analysis. Without adequate historical data, AI models cannot perform back-testing or learn from past market cycles.

Privacy Requirements

Family offices manage highly sensitive information that extends well beyond financial data to include personal family matters, health information, estate plans, philanthropic intentions, and business strategies. Protecting this information can limit or complicate access to certain datasets needed for AI implementation.

Family Offices Must Evolve

Many family offices rely on legacy technology systems that were never designed with AI integration in mind. These systems may lack modern APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or data export capabilities that AI tools require.

The rapid evolution of AI also means that a leadership team's expertise can quickly become outdated. Continuous learning is essential. Family office staff need opportunities to develop new skills, experiment with emerging technologies, and stay current with industry developments, which requires investment in training, professional development, conference attendance, and collaboration with academic institutions or industry groups. Organizations that cultivate a learning culture -- one where experimentation is encouraged and failure is tolerated -- are better positioned to adapt to technological change.

Finally, family offices are not static entities, and data infrastructure must accommodate growth without requiring constant re-architecture. An AI platform that performs well with $500 million in assets across 50 positions may struggle when a portfolio grows to $2 billion across hundreds or thousands of positions spanning multiple asset classes and jurisdictions. Scalability must be a design priority from the outset.

Preparing for What’s Next

AI has the potential to reshape how family offices operate, but meaningful results depend on the strength of the data foundation beneath it. For many organizations, the challenge is not a lack of information, but fragmented systems, inconsistent reporting, and operational complexity that limit visibility and scalability. As portfolios expand across asset classes, entities, custodians, and jurisdictions, these challenges only intensify, increasing the need for structured, integrated, and reliable data.

In Part 2, we’ll explore what it takes to move forward in practice, including how to strengthen data strategy and align the right operating model. Effective AI starts with disciplined accounting and a clear operational foundation. At Archway, we combine purpose-built technology with deep accounting expertise to help family offices bring structure and consistency to increasingly complex environments.

In a recent post, we outlined five focus areas for starting an AI journey, with Get Educated as the essential first step. Given the enormous amount of buzz and hype surrounding AI, we wanted to point you toward sources that go beyond the headlines and offer substantive, fact-based information and perspectives.

Below is a curated list of educational resources for Family Offices looking to build their AI knowledge. We start with our top recommendations: MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, three institutions at the forefront of AI research and among the most authoritative sources for insights on artificial intelligence trends and developments. Leading AI platforms OpenAI and Claude also offer helpful educational content. For current news and developments, Forbes and Wired are solid starting points. We've also included online courses for those seeking deeper immersion, a selection of books offering both accessible and in-depth perspectives, and research from several leading consulting firms.

Top Recommendations

• MIT Technology Review – No hype; written by practitioners. technologyreview.com | MIT AI News
• Stanford AI Index Report – hai.stanford.edu/ai-index
• Stanford Digital Economy Lab – digitaleconomy.stanford.edu
• OpenAI – Leading AI platform; research, tools, and product updates (ChatGPT). openai.com
• Claude – Leading AI platform; research, tools, and product updates. claude.ai
• The Batch (DeepLearning.AI) – Explains what matters in AI. deeplearning.ai/thebatch
• Harvard Business Review – AI case studies. hbr.org
• Artificial Intelligence News – Trends and real-world applications. artificialintelligence-news.com
• Forbes AI – forbes.com/ai
• Wired – Artificial Intelligence – AI use cases and analysis. wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence

Educational Courses ‍

• Coursera – AI courses and specializations from Stanford and DeepLearning.AI, including Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning" and "AI for Everyone." coursera.org
• edX – Courses from MIT, Harvard, Microsoft, and others, covering foundational to advanced AI topics. edx.org
• Udacity – Nanodegree programs in AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and more, with a hands-on project focus. udacity.com
• Udemy – A wide range of AI courses for all levels, with practical, real-world applications. udemy.com
• DataCamp – Specializes in data science and AI through interactive coding tutorials and projects. datacamp.com
• Google AI – Free tutorials, resources, and hands-on labs via the "Learn with Google AI" portal. ai.google

Books and Reading Material‍

• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane – Funny and accessible; a great introduction to how AI actually works.
• The Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson – Written for a general audience; no technical background required.
• AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee – Examines the real-world impact of AI across industries and geographies.
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig – The definitive AI textbook.
• Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville – A comprehensive guide to deep learning techniques.
• Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron – Practical projects and clear explanations for building AI applications.

Consulting Firms

• McKinsey – State of AI report. mckinsey.com
• Boston Consulting Group – AI insights and research. bcg.com
• EY – Family enterprise and family office perspectives. ey.com
• Campden Wealth – Research focused on family offices and wealth. campdenwealth.com
• Family Office Exchange (FOX) – A leading association for family offices; sponsors peer research and education on technology issues. familyoffice.com

This list is by no means exhaustive, but we've aimed to highlight some of the most respected and accessible sources available — a solid starting point with a range of options to suit different learning styles and goals. We believe now is the time for family office leaders to begin their AI journey and, as we said in our earlier post, take the AI plunge. Have fun, and good luck; we're always here to help.

David O'Kane, Head of Product, Archway

Below is a recap of the keynote fireside chat from Archway's Immersion Lite Conference in Dallas, presented from the perspective of Archway’s CEO, Anthony Abenante.

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Family Offices & Artificial Intelligence: Getting Started

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Catherine Fankhauser, Partner and Practice Leader, Family Office Advisory Services at Ernst & Young (EY), where she shared her insight on Family Offices and how they are approaching the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI). She brought a well-informed perspective given that she spends 100% of her time with Single Family Offices (SFOs) in areas including operations, governance, and risk.

As we began our conversation, there was clear agreement that AI represented lots of things to lots of people; discussion and debate is clearly ubiquitous at this point, both professionally and personally. As EY works with a broad swath of Family Offices, I asked Catherine to provide insight into how they’re collectively thinking about the implications of AI adoption for their operations. In effect, what's driving both their motivation to adopt AI as well as their fear of its implications?

Further, a growing – and now prevailing – swath of their clients is fully aware that they can no longer ignore AI but just don’t know how to get started. It's as if people are lined up with their toes at the edge of a swimming pool, looking to see which of their friends have jumped in. They’re seeing other organizations in their ecosystem -- like banks and investment firms -- getting in said pool. And as a result, they ask: should we get in the AI pool as well? She thought many are waiting for that first real use case representing a tangible reason to take the plunge. In many ways, her swimming pool analogy was a perfect way to summarize current state.

And, at the same time as they are standing by that AI pool, we see these Family Office leaders reading about the vast amounts of money pouring into projected required infrastructure to facilitate LLMs by the likes of Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. So instead of asking how cold the water is, they should be asking how and/or where to commence their respective AI journeys. What should they be thinking about in a practical way, as to not get stuck in a sinkhole of discovery while overspending and ending up with intangible results

Given all the above, the natural next question to pose was around how people should think about getting started?

What follows are Catherine’s suggested five areas of focus for initiating an AI journey…

1. Get Educated‍

When people talk about AI, they employ a uniquely different and growing vernacular. Get educated on the types of AI, its componentry and its terms. To be clear, not all these terms are interchangeable: Robotic Process Automation is not machine learning; Large Language models (LLMs) are not agentic AI. Simply put, it’s imperative to get educated.

Further to that point, I made reference to a growing set of great sources of AI information available and that Archway plans on subsequent posts highlighting many of these resources as we all collectively learn, develop, and share better AI deployment and utilization practices. Stay tuned.

2. Have Good Data‍

Catherine stressed that AI capabilities and functionality are only going to be as good as the data it is processing. Bad data = bad output, rendering AI utilization of no use. She gave the example of an EY client Family Office where the client was having a horrendous time with wash sales and preparing tax returns. EY has an AI tool to analyze all your different accounts and come up with your wash sales. Unfortunately, the Family Office couldn't make use of the tool because they couldn't generate the data to feed it. We both agreed that now is time to start getting your data organized into modernized data storage structure(s) housed in a repository where you can aggregate all your data sources.

3. Access Control‍

When thinking about access control, I typically conjure images of keeping the humans away from technology. This is not what Catherine meant. She was saying, conversely, to keep the technology away from the humans (and their sensitive data and information…). AI does not discriminate. It will take everything -- including highly sensitive data -- and use that information to train itself. Organizations need to think about how they are going to put a fence around the AI while being judicious around what data to feed it. Catherine stressed the need to perform curative work around properly ringfencing and/or deleting data that shouldn’t be consumed by an LLM. This work is just one of the many steps around forward AI governance that will need to be developed, evolved and continuously applied with unfailing rigor.

4. Privacy Policy‍

Catherine added that Family Offices need to think about the other aspects of managing their data, aside from Access Control. They need to determine what data is off limits: How long should it be kept? Who has access to the data? Do we have a retention policy? What is our privacy policy? She suggested that once you come up with those parameters, memorialize them and make sure they are clearly understood.

In addition to internal data, think about the data your venders have access to as well: What information do our lawyers, accountants, and other service providers have about our organization? Do we want them to have it if they are using AI? Do we want our information training their models? These third parties need to be part of your privacy footprint.

5. Governance

This topic might be the most important area in which we spend significant time thinking about here at Archway. How best to implement and manage AI usage & deployment in your organization? Who should be the architects of your AI policy and in what form should they be structured: cross-functional team members in committee form or do you stand up a board of governance? It can -- and should -- also be manifest in a set of guidelines that everyone agrees to abide by. Catherine said to think of governance as the guardrails and controls for implementing AI throughout your complex. It determines who decides why and where AI is used, what data will be available to the language models, and who has access to results. It can also assess risks and determine if the AI capability is delivering on promised functionality. As our clients consider this question, we continue to manage Archway’s AI discovery and deployment journey with these nuanced decisions in mind.

In conclusion, we’re very grateful to Catherine for taking the time to share her insights with us. I found her five-step plan to be an insightful and effective guide for helping to frame one’s thinking around getting started with their respective AI journey. Here’s to hoping that this will help more people take the plunge and get into the pool.

Anthony Abenante | CEO Archway Group

Archway and Canoe Forge Path to Further Advance Alts Data Management for Family Offices Using the Archway Platform

Since 2020, collaboration and a desire to solve complex financial problems have been at the core of Archway and Canoe Intelligence’s strategic partnership. Throughout the years, Archway’s experience working with nearly 600 ultra-high-net-worth families through the Archway Platform has made them acutely familiar with the challenges family offices face when it comes to collecting and reporting on alternative investment data.

Coupled with Canoe’s innovation and vision in the alts technology space, where the Canoe platform covers 42,000 active funds across $8T in Assets Under Management or Advisement for its 325 alternative investor clients, our teams knew early on there was an immense opportunity to streamline alternative investment data management within the family office space.

Recently, the two teams have been working on the next iteration of our partnership as we develop a more robust integration between the Canoe and Archway platforms.

This integration between Canoe and Archway automates the transmission of private equity and hedge fund valuations, as well as Private Equity Call and Distribution data. Moreover, Hedge Fund subscriptions and redemptions extracted from Canoe can be effortlessly imported into Archway.

In this article, we share how the two technologies are teaming up to test and build this expanded integration—and how we believe it can level up the operational efficiency for our mutual family office clients.

Common Challenges in Alts Data Management

Alternative investors, particularly family offices, navigate a complex landscape fraught with challenges when it comes to managing alts data. Among these challenges are data silos, where crucial information is scattered across multiple systems and platforms, making it difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of investments. Additionally, the reliance on manual data entry introduces a significant risk of human error and inefficiency, consuming valuable time and resources.

Compounding these issues is the lack of standardized data formats, further complicating the integration and analysis of disparate data sources.

In response to these challenges, Archway Family Office Services and Canoe Intelligence are expanding their strategic partnership and integration methods. By automating data transmission and ensuring data consistency, the integration streamlines the process of accessing and integrating alts data. This not only enhances operational efficiency but also mitigates the risk of errors, empowering family offices to make informed decisions with confidence.

How Canoe Enhances Archway’s Platform

• Automated Fund and Allocation-Level Data Extraction: Canoe's integration with the Archway Platform facilitates automated extraction, validation, and delivery of fund and allocation-level data.
• Pricing Updates: Canoe seamlessly updates pricing information in Archway, providing alternative investment valuation data extracted as soon as received and processed.
• Effortless Management of Capital Calls and Distributions: Canoe automates the process of updating Archway with capital call and distribution transactions.
• Streamlined Subscription and Redemption Transactions: Canoe generates extracts of subscription or redemption transactions, which can be uploaded directly to Archway.

Archway’s Platform at a Glance

Archway's Platform serves as a comprehensive wealth management technology solution tailored specifically for family offices. With Archway, family offices gain access to a wide range of benefits, including a 360-degree view of clients' wealth, enhanced operational efficiency, improved data accuracy and reliability, and robust operational and client reporting.

Bringing the Integration to Life

Prior to launching beta testing for the integration in late 2023, the Archway and Canoe teams worked in concert to automate data flows, normalize values, and define accounting rules and transaction mapping across systems.

The teams collaborated on extensive internal testing to validate the effectiveness and reliability of the integration, with the intent to not only automate the transmission of alternative asset data between platforms, but to simplify the complex nature of accounting for alternative investment transactions.

Through rigorous analysis and learning, the team identified and addressed potential challenges, fine-tuning the integration to meet the unique needs and requirements of family offices.

Now in its beta testing phase, the team continues to collect invaluable real-world perspectives, helping to guide iterative improvements and ensuring alignment with client expectations.

To date, Canoe has processed 150,000+ documents on behalf of Archway’s clients. Additionally, this collaborative effort has positioned two dozen mutual clients to automate the transmission of data across 3,400+ alternative investments, underscoring the substantial impact of the integration on operational efficiency and data management accuracy.

What's Coming Next

Looking ahead, Archway and Canoe are finalizing the initial integration offering with plans to expand the universe of data available to mutual clients seeking to automate the transmission of their alternative asset data. This next phase promises to unlock new levels of efficiency and value for family offices leveraging the combined power of the Archway’s Platform and Canoe Intelligence.

As Archway continues to leverage Canoe's capabilities, clients can expect further enhancements that drive continued scale and elevate client satisfaction. With a commitment to innovation and excellence, Archway and Canoe are poised to shape the future of alts data management. Stay tuned for more updates as the integration nears launch later this year.

Disclaimer: All statistics as of March 31, 2024.

Originally published by Canoe Intelligence.

A New Way to Synthesize, Visualize, and Analyze Family Office Data

With reporting at the center of nearly every family office software buying decision, the Archway Platform has offered a robust suite of reporting tools since its earliest days.

Launching with a raw database export capability, a handful of in-app performance visualizations, and roughly two dozen statement-style reports, the Archway Platform’s reporting foundation was set out of the gates.

Within the first five years of being on the market, the solution’s feature set quickly grew to include over 40 distinct reporting options.

By 2009, the Archway Platform featured more than 90 reports within its standard report library and users were first introduced to the concept of dynamic dashboards for quick, on-screen consumption of data. In 2012, the platform’s first standalone client portal application, dubbed FOIL, was released.

Over the course of the next decade, the standard report library ballooned to more than 200 parameter-driven reports, thousands of queries were built, dozens of dashboard inserts were rolled out, data grid customization was implemented throughout the application, and the Archway Client Portal was further enhanced to be an on-demand, mobile reporting tool for end-clients and family members.

Together, the Archway Platform’s standard report library, data queries, dashboards, custom data grids, and client portal served as a powerful, multi-faceted reporting engine.

But with an eye towards innovation, it was always clear that reporting is a function of our solution that can constantly be built upon: More metrics, more insights, more flexibility.

And so, in 2023, we introduced the Archway Platform’s report composer tool.

A unique, interactive reporting experience, the report composer functionality allows family offices to comprehensively analyze their enterprise data in a user-driven, self-service manner. Both elegant and powerful, the latest tool in the Archway Platform’s reporting suite grants nontechnical users the ability to create bespoke data views that deliver better insights and better reporting outputs for their needs.

Pulling from the Archway Platform’s vast database, family offices can assemble custom reports using raw data related to accounts payable, general ledger detail, investor activity, transactions, open positions, alternative assets, and other financial information.

But perhaps most important: The tool is inherently designed with versatility in mind. Featuring a drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build and edit custom reports in real-time, the report composer allows users to add, remove, and reorder data points—all without coding or custom development. And since the tool is embedded directly within the Archway Platform, users can dynamically group, sort, and filter their data based on their existing user-defined data classifications.

Using visualizations and charting tools like pie, bar, and line charts, users can further transform their data into meaningful analytics that help tell a story of trends, comparisons, and measurements.

Although a sophisticated reporting tool by nature, the Archway Platform’s report composer capability offers family offices yet another reporting mechanism built on the principle of simplexity: A simple interface that allows users to access and synthesize complex financial data on demand.

The report composer tool serves an important role in how family offices and advisors to high-net-worth families compile, communicate, and analyze their clients’ financial information, and seamlessly complements the existing suite of Archway Platform reporting capabilities.

Interested in seeing the report composer in action? Request a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team to schedule your live tour of the Archway Platform.

How Family Offices Use the Archway Platform℠ to Create Bespoke Client Reports

Every family office professional understands the necessity of balance sheets and income statements: They serve a fundamental purpose in understanding an individual’s financial position. And, fortunately, there are many family office software and service providers that can produce them.

But conventional financial statements rarely provide the level of insight needed to fully satisfy bespoke client requests.

As you’ve likely encountered, assembling non-traditional reports often requires unique attributes or classifications, custom data groupings, and client-specific data points. Moreover, if the request involves uncommon assets or personalized investment frameworks, compiling the data can require a heavy lift.

In our 20+ years working with family offices and advisors to high-net-worth families, we’ve received plenty of unique reporting requests, and we know how important it is to present complex—sometimes irregular—investment data in a simple, yet meaningful report.

Combining the robustness of the Archway Platform’s reporting engine with the flexibility of its user-defined data attributes and classifications, we’ve had the opportunity to help our clients harness the power of the platform to craft creative, tailored reporting outputs for their end-clients.

Whether you’re interested in building a report that compares household expenses across multiple properties, analyzes clean energy investments, or summarizes artwork valuations, the Archway Platform’s 200+ standard reports and multi-pronged reporting capabilities can help you quickly produce an easy-to-consume report.

Here are five unique reports, built using the Archway Platform, that break the boundaries of traditional family office reporting and deliver creative, tailored financial insights.

Inspiration #1. Paintings by historical era.

While it’s well known that artwork is a commonly held asset amongst family offices, the asset type tends to lack influence and inclusion in the development of family office technology and reporting standards. But given its prominence in high-net-worth investment portfolios, artwork—like any other asset—deserves specialized reporting.

Using the Archway Platform’s flexible, parameter-driven reporting templates, users can customize the view to see purchase price, change in market value, and unrealized gains / losses across the owner’s fine art collection. Perhaps more importantly, they can create custom attributes such as artist, historical era, region of origin, or art consultant—ultimately, allowing family offices to create a wholly unique way to consume artwork-related financial insights.

Inspiration #2. Profit comparison by horse.

Perhaps not as widely held as fine art, thoroughbred racing talent still requires an impressive amount of asset management. Leveraging the Archway Platform’s ability to create a fully customized general ledger, family offices can categorize and group expenses, measure their costs against equestrian-generated income, and compare profits across horses with simplicity and ease.

Inspiration #3. Primary residence expenses.

When you operate multiple households or properties, it can be difficult to compile the various expenses associated with each location. Spanning across utility and tax bills to insurance, property upkeep, and household staff payroll costs, it’s critical to know how much money is being spent on each property.

Using custom general ledger accounts and flexible reporting templates, family offices can succinctly compare property ownership costs across multi-level, user-defined expense categories.

Inspiration #4. Rental property income.

Like personal properties, many family offices hold a variety of rental properties. As a result, from time to time, you may be asked how much rental income is being generated—and which property is earning the most.

Using a combination of customized general ledger accounts and property-based portfolios, the Archway Platform’s reporting suite allows users to quickly produce a consolidated net income report that displays revenue and general operating expenses by individual rental property.

Inspiration #5. Impact report.

New investment frameworks—whether generally accepted or internally developed—are routinely popping up in the family office arena. Having the flexibility to infinitely tag assets with unique attributes gives family office professionals the opportunity to slice-and-dice data in line with the overarching investment strategy.

Using the Archway Platform’s multi-level grouping mechanisms, you can take multiple frameworks, such as foreign investment allocation laid over the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, to present a unique view of investment impact across regions, areas of development, and environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

To learn more about how the Archway Platform’s powerful reporting engine can help your family office deliver tailored financial insights, check out a demo or schedule a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team.

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.

The Importance of a Family Office Software User Community

At Archway Family Office Services, we have always prided ourselves on our ability to understand the nuances of our ultra-high-net-worth clients. Our teams have extensive experience working through complex issues and one-off scenarios that are unique to family offices and private wealth management organizations. We are, by all accounts, well suited for the job.

We’ve helped hundreds of family offices leverage the Archway Platform to support critical facets of their operations like central disbursement entities, multi-layered ownership structures, complex equity transfers, and family member-specific reporting requirements.

But even our most tenured team members will tell you: There is no substitute for the opportunity to problem solve amongst your peers.

As mentioned in our blog discussing the what, where, who, and why of Archway’s exclusive Archway Platform User Conference, IMMERSION, the leading request from our clients is access to other members of our family office user community.

So what exactly can family offices who share a common wealthtech solution—say, the Archway Platform—learn from one another?

1. How family offices are using the Archway Platform to solve complex issues.

The evolution of family offices and the development of family office software are undeniably intertwined. As the needs of family offices have shifted over the years, so has the Archway Platform’s suite of tools.

With each product upgrade, we’ve introduced new functionality, built efficiencies and automation into the application, and enhanced the capabilities of our existing tools. As a result, our users have found that there’s often more than one way to do the same thing in the system.

And while we offer release notes, product documentation, and system training, sometimes the easiest way to learn something is to hear from someone else that’s already using it.

Common in-app operations that our clients discuss with one another include:

• How to transfer ownership based on different scenarios, and which Archway Platform tool is most suitable for the desired outcome
• Best practices when using the Archway Platform’s reconciliation tools
• Usage of alternative asset-specific tools to track activity and report on investments
• Accounts payable processes best practices
• Creating ad hoc reports and recurring family member report packages
• Archway Client Portal use cases and adoption strategies for family members and outside stakeholders

2. What Archway Platform tools they could be utilizing, but aren’t today.

When a client begins discussing how they’re using the Archway Platform to solve complex issues, this often leads to another user saying, “We hadn’t thought of doing it that way!”

The fact of the matter is, it’s our human nature to create routines and processes. If a process works, we don’t necessarily go out looking for another way to do it. But, when a step in the process changes, it presents an inflection point: Is there a better way to do this?

And when it’s time for our clients to find that answer, Archway Family Office Services offers multiple channels:

• Reach out to the Archway Family Office Services Client Relations team for product support
• Engage with the Archway Platform Training team for consulting on a new process
• Pose that exact question to other Archway Platform users through a variety of forums and idea exchanges in our secure, online client support portal

Although it’s widely accepted that each family office has its own unique way of operating, we frequently find that there are common threads that tie them together. While our clients’ experiences may not be identical, users may have experienced similar scenarios that can nonetheless lead to the adoption of new tools and the implementation of new processes.

3. Which reports they can use to answer challenging financial questions.

Reporting is the pinnacle of family office wealthtech. It is, after all, how family offices and the family members they advise render and make sense of the data that’s been collected, entered, and validated in the technology. So it’s no surprise that reporting is one of the most comprehensive functions that exists in the Archway Platform.

With a suite of tools consisting of an extensive report library, raw data queries, dashboards, and a client reporting portal, users of the Archway Platform have a variety of options when it comes to reporting on their financial data.

That said, in a perfect world, family office professionals would have plenty of free time to explore the report library, try out new queries, and customize reporting dashboards. But day-to-day responsibilities often prevent that.

So what’s a quick and easy way to discover new reporting ideas? Clever report configurations? Unique data classifications and groupings?

Enter: The Archway Platform user community.

By inquiring with other users to learn what reports they’re using, which metrics they’re leveraging, and how they’re applying parameters and data groupings, family offices can quickly identify the right combination of reports, data points, and formats to get the output they desire—straight from the individuals that have walked the same path.

4. How family offices are handling situations that have nothing to do with the software.

Perhaps the most important thing family offices can learn from one another has nothing to do with technology or operations at all.

As anyone who works in the family office arena knows, it can be excruciatingly difficult for family offices to connect with other family offices. And while there are a variety of family office membership organizations and events that can help, family offices are, generally speaking, incredibly private and confidential, making networking and communicating with one another challenging.

Understanding that gap and recognizing the commonality of our client base, we created a trusted community in which all of the members share a unifying theme: Usage of the Archway Platform.

Sustained through national and regional user conferences, virtual peer dialogues, online user forums, and brokered introductions, our family office software user community presents our clients with the unique opportunity to connect and build relationships with other family office professionals.

Through their expanded network, our clients have gone on to create a variety of breakout peer groups that frequently get together to discuss the issues they face as family offices—whether it pertains to the Archway Platform or not.

These peer groups, though born out of their common usage of the Archway Platform, have grown across a much wider spectrum, where family office professionals can discuss trust law, tax planning, family office restructuring, burgeoning investment strategies, talent acquisition, process documentation and new hire training, and so much more. The community has flourished.

To learn more about joining the Archway Platform user community, schedule a call with a member of our team to discover how other family offices and private wealth management firms are using Archway’s purpose-built wealth management solutions.

Everything you need to know about IMMERSION: Archway’s Platform^SM User Conference

When we ask our clients what would help them become even more successful, we get plenty of answers: Specialized functionality, new reports, more hours in the day. But time and time again, the answer that we hear most often—the one that is echoed over and over by family offices, regardless of location, size, or tenure—is the opportunity to connect with other family offices.

And so, nearly a decade ago, the IMMERSION User Conference was born.

Let’s take a look at the history of IMMERSION: What it is, where it happens, who attends, and why it’s become a mainstay in the Archway Family Office Services training program.

What is IMMERSION?

The IMMERSION User Conference is a multi-day training and networking event hosted by Archway Family Office Services. We invite our family clients from across the globe to join us for a three day immersive experience (see what we did there?), where they’re given the opportunity to:

• Receive firsthand training from our team of experts
• Preview new Archway Platform enhancements
• Join roundtables discussing family office best practices
• Hear from strategic partners about additional family office solutions
• Build their network of family office professionals

While at IMMERSION, attendees can choose from a menu of expertly curated, CPE-accredited sessions. Focusing on key functional areas of our family office software platform, these sessions deliver best practices, tips, and tricks in areas like troubleshooting system issues, completing reconciliations, managing accounts payable, tracking alternative investments, measuring performance, and producing family office reporting.

In 2016, we introduced our first-ever New User Workshop, giving new clients the opportunity to get up to speed prior to the more advanced sessions at the main conference. Not surprisingly, the New User Workshop has become a cornerstone of our event and has expanded to include not only new users, but existing users simply looking for a refresher on Archway Platform blocking and tackling.

Where does IMMERSION take place?

Since the inaugural IMMERSION was hosted in our hometown of Indianapolis, IN, in 2014, we’ve had the chance to collect plenty of feedback over the course of several events, allowing us to evolve the format of the event, the topics we cover, how we deliver the content, and even where we host the conference.

Following our first IMMERSION User Conference, we decided that we would alternate between the large global conference in even-numbered years and smaller, regional user conferences in odd-numbered years.

We followed this cadence through 2019, hosting two additional IMMERSION User Conferences in Indianapolis and a dozen regional user conferences across the country, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco—and many more in between.

But like most firms, Archway Family Office Services took IMMERSION virtual in 2020 and 2021 as we adjusted to the world around us. Broadcasting live from a pop-up studio in our Indianapolis office and powered by a newsroom-worthy studio crew, we were able to carry on the IMMERSION tradition despite the obstacles that inherently come with transitioning a typically in-person event to being fully online.

And now, in October 2022, we are back in-person and we’ve moved. This year, our global conference is being hosted in Austin, TX.

Who goes to IMMERSION?

IMMERSION is an exclusive, invitation-only event for our family office and private wealth clients. By bringing together a group of family office professional that all share a common usage of the Archway Platform, we create an intimate, secure environment where users can connect, share ideas, collaborate, and learn together.

Today, IMMERSION has become a core tenant of the Archway Family Office Services training program. Outside of its discernible popularity amongst clients, the event has grown be so much more than a training exercise for users.

IMMERSION is an opportunity for our team to connect with one another, to put faces to names, and build lasting relationships with our clients. Sure, we spend a lot of time talking about partnership accounting, performance validation, and data management.

But we spend an equal amount of time talking about the things that happen in our lives outside of the four walls we work within. IMMERSION is about discovery and learning and bringing people together: Some of the most human elements we all possess.

After 20 years working with family offices, the team at Archway Family Office Services understands how critical your technology partner—and the people who comprise it—is to your success. Which is why we invite our clients to come together for a day—or three—every year so that we can continue to grow together.

Discover the many ways Archway Family Office Services connects with our family office clients through education, support, and training in our mini ebook, Our Commitment to Exceptional Client Service.

Leveraging Family Office Software and Outsourced Services to Help Your Operations Stay Balanced

The very nature of a family office is to provide multiple services, across multiple households, across multiple generations. To that end, it goes without saying that family offices are rarely, if ever, afforded a singular operational focus.

The ubiquity of daily, multi-entity data management, routine monitoring of inflows and outflows, evolving investment strategies, shifting ownership structures, and seemingly always-on-the-horizon tax and reporting deadlines can make running a family office inherently challenging. Compounded by social, economic, and political influences, running a family office can truly become a balancing act.

And when you’re juggling that many balls at the same time, it can be difficult to know which ones to keep in the air and which to hand off to someone else.

Luckily, growth and innovation in the family office space have created a host of options to help lighten the operational burden.

Struggling with your family office’s financial data management? Evaluating or implementing a new technology solution? Wanting to connect with other family office professionals to talk shop? From purpose-built family office technology to exclusive family office communities, dedicated family office service providers, and experienced consultants, the answers are out there. You just need to know where to look.

Here are three universal strategies that can help your family office identify solutions and overcome its unique challenges—big or small.

Pursue all of the training, education, and networking opportunities.

You’ve probably said it, we’ve definitely said it, and you’ve surely heard it: We don’t know what we don’t know. But more often than not, someone is willing and able to help you learn—and what better way to connect and share experiences than through training, education, and networking events?

Nevertheless, even on our best days, when your capacity is already hitting the limiter, it can be hard to look at a new opportunity and say, “Yes, I want to add more to my plate.”

We get it: It’s hard to make time. We’ve all felt the pinch, but when it comes to training, education, and networking, we at Archway Family Office Services firmly believe it’s worth the reward.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Scheduling one-on-one or team training with your technology provider

Pros: Expand your knowledge of the application; Explore new tools and functionality; Smooth out workflows; Discover ways to automate processes and reduce clicks

Cons: Requires time out of your schedule; May incur a financial cost

Attending a family office conference

Pros: Connect with other family office professionals; Discuss alternative solutions to shared operational challenges; Learn about new technology and service providers; Gain insight into regulatory changes, investment trends, and other strategic topics

Cons: Requires time out of your schedule; May incur a financial cost

Among the weary, the busy, and the cost-conscious, a natural response is to say “I don’t have the time” or “It’s not in the budget.” But a shift in mindset to say “It is worth my time” or “It is worth the cost” can pave the way to new connections, elevated conversations, and creative ideas that just may hold the solution to your most stubborn challenges.

Don’t be afraid to outsource underserved operations.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of training, education, or networking—after all, even a creative solution can’t add hours to the day. And if you’re not in a position to hire additional staff, capacity challenges can quickly become overwhelming.

But the situation doesn’t have to be dire. The industry is laced with experienced, trusted service providers that specialize in family office operations.

Take Archway Family Office Services for example. Given our deep roots in family office software, it’s only natural that we offer outsourced services to our clients that either augment or replace their in-house usage of the Archway Platform^SM.

Ranging from portfolio reconciliation and consolidated client reporting to personal expense management and partnership administration, our menu of solutions helps our clients create a bespoke combination of technology and services that is right-sized for their family office or financial institution.

Still on the fence? Check out the Top 10 Reasons Private Wealth Managers Choose an Outsourcing Partner.

So, whether you’re looking for expertise in broader areas like financial data management and tax planning, or more niche areas like private foundation management and family governance, there’s a good chance you can find a service provider that specializes in it.

Which brings us to the world of consultants.

Partner with an experienced consultant.

When in doubt, reach out to a consultant.

Oftentimes leveraging in-depth assessments and contextual reviews, consultants are equipped to help make recommendations that are appropriately suited for your family office. Their range of expertise and their unbiased opinion can help your family office identify key pain points, evaluate viable solutions, partner with experienced technology and service providers, and implement long-term strategies.

Read How Consultants Can Help Family Offices to get a deeper understanding of the three primary roles of family office consultants: Administrative consulting, technology consulting, and operational consulting.

Contact Archway Family Office Services to find out how our suite of technology and service solutions helps our clients overcome their accounting, investment data aggregation, and reporting challenges.

Just need a suggestion for a family office consultant or conference? We can do that too.

Using Client Service as a Mechanism to Qualify Family Office Technology Providers

Capabilities and tools, code and databases, reports and more reports.

When it comes to family office technology evaluations, these tend to be the topics that dominate most conversations. And for good reason: These topics are, no doubt, core to selecting a solution that will work for your family office.

But a technology solution that merely works for your family office is a far cry from a technology solution that enhances your family office. Your family office software should extend beyond functionality and reporting. Ideally, an investment of this magnitude should support the growth and strategy of the family, generation over generation.

In our experience, the key to finding a dependable technology partner with a staying power equal to the family wealth itself is to look beyond the product or service and evaluate the whole of the firm’s client service approach.

It’s no secret that at Archway Family Office Services, we routinely cite the importance of client service as a key consideration when choosing a family office software provider.

Client Support

Oftentimes, the most common face of client service is client support. In the traditional sense of client support, this is the real human answering the phone, replying to your email, or triaging your support ticket. In a more modern sense, it could equate to chatbots, automated voice systems, or robotic process automation (RPA).

When evaluating your technology provider’s client support capabilities, consider the following:

• Support hours and availability
• Location of support staff
• Types of support channels (i.e. phone, email, online support portal, etc.)
• Experience and/or qualifications of support staff
• Self-service support capabilities

Client Education

Client education can come in a variety of forms, from knowledge bases, setup guides, and product release notes to step-by-step process and policy documentation. A key pillar in any client service model, education is fundamental to giving clients the tools they need to successfully operate a wealthtech solution.

But perhaps more notably, this facet of client service puts clients in the driver’s seat, allowing them to acquire the knowledge and skills they need so that they can become self-sufficient within the application.

When evaluating your technology provider’s client education capabilities, consider the following:

• Availability of online, self-service product documentation
• Communication strategy related to product enhancements, upgrades, and announcements
• Creation of thorough process documentation and/or best practices for critical operations
• Access to how-to guides, tutorials, and setup manuals
• Opportunity to join peer networks and/or forums for best practices, tips, and tricks

Client Training

Ongoing client training is critical to maximizing your family office’s technology investment. Training represents the tipping point from becoming self-sufficient to proficient in an application and often covers more advanced features and functions of the technology.

At Archway Family Office Services, we offer a variety of training opportunities including ad hoc client-specific trainings, recorded tutorials, live group trainings, and our pinnacle training event exclusively for our family office clients: Archway’s IMMERSION User Conference.

When evaluating your technology provider’s client training capabilities, consider the following:

• Availability of dedicated, in-house training staff
• In-person and/or virtual group training opportunities
• One-on-one custom training opportunities
• Access to user conferences, regional user groups, or client communities
• Accreditation of training content

By checking the boxes in these three areas of client service, your family office can feel more confident in not only the technology you’ve selected, but the people, processes, and documentation that will support you going forward. More importantly, these areas—even more so than the software itself—will define how you engage, connect, and grow with your technology partner for years to come.

Learn more about how Archway Family Office Services builds lasting relationships and connects with our family office and financial institution clients through education, support, and training in our mini ebook, Our Commitment to Exceptional Client Service.

What to Look for When Selecting Client Portal Technology for Your Family Office

Client portals have taken many shapes throughout the years. With nearly every modern financial institution offering clients some form of digital access to their financial information, online portal technology is a far cry from its infancy.

The same can be said for family office client portals.

To paint the picture, let's take a look at the evolution of the Archway Platform^SM and its portal technology.

Originally introduced in the early 2000s, our initial portal concept was referred to simply as Investor Login. Limited to a handful of configuration options, the Archway Platform's Investor Login served as an online access point for individual users to view performance returns, capital activity, fees, and a select number of reports.

Since those early days, we have rolled out several iterations of the portal using a combination of client requests, internal feedback, and a healthy dose of innovative thinking.

Which brings us to today, where the Archway Client Portal gives end-clients on-demand access to an interactive, mobile financial reporting tool.

Based on our experience developing and enhancing our own family office software and client portal, here are several key financial insights you should consider looking for when selecting client portal technology for your family office or financial institution.

1. Consolidated net worth

This seemingly simple request can actually be one of the most difficult to questions to answer, especially when it comes to high-net-worth (HNW) individuals.

Your family office’s client portal should be able to—at a minimum—tell your end-client exactly how much they are worth, inclusive of cash, investments, property, and indirect exposure to additional holdings, at the click of a button.

We recommend looking for family office portal technology that can:

• Consolidate net worth across entities, portfolios, and assets
• Compute net worth based on direct and indirect holdings
• Show net worth changes over time based on investment performance, purchases, sales, contributions, withdrawals, accruals, and other types of activity

2. Aggregated holdings

Having the means to answer the question “How much am I worth?” is powerful, but being able to show the assets that make up your client’s net worth can have an even greater appeal.

A standard family office client portal should allow your end-clients to view individual holdings. An elite family office client portal should allow your end-clients to consolidate, group, filter, and categorize their holdings in ways that are meaningful to their understanding.

We recommend looking for family office portal technology that can:

• Aggregate holdings data across all types of assets such as equities, bonds, cash, real estate, personal assets, and alternative investments like private equity, hedge funds, and cryptocurrency
• Assess changes in market values over time
• Maintain user-defined asset categories or groupings

3. Investment performance

Being able to analyze investment performance falls into family office reporting 101—and serves as a key capability of any financial reporting tool. But to really hit the mark, a family office client portal should feature the ability to attribute performance to factors like asset type, portfolio manager, strategy, or region.

We recommend looking for family office portal technology that can:

• Render performance data in both graphic and tabular formats
• Compare performance against benchmarks
• Measure performance over time, across multiple periods
• Use multiple performance calculations such as time-weighted and money-weighted returns

4. Cash balances

Understanding how much cash is available at any point in time is vital to a client’s financial health, particularly amongst individuals that have high transaction volumes or large purchase amounts.

Even for clients whose bills are paid by family office staff or an outsourced bill payment service, it’s always helpful to know how much money is available for day-to-day expenses.

We recommend looking for family office portal technology that can:

• Pull in daily cash activity from banks, custodians, and brokerage firms
• Provide on-demand cash balances as of a point in time
• Display cash flows and changes in cash balances over time

5. Expense and spending detail

Speaking of expenses, it can be easy for a family office or HNW advisor to focus their client portal search on tools that primarily show investment-related detail. But there can be tremendous value in being able to share accounting and investment data within a single portal.

By selecting a tool that can summarize expenses, identify spending habits, and even compare outflow detail against budgets and cash inflows, end-clients are able to be more in control of their recurring cash flow.

We recommend looking for family office portal technology that can:

• Categorize expenses based on user-defined expense categories
• Display summary-level expense data as well as underlying detail such as vendors, payment terms, and invoices

Beyond financial analytics and insights, we recommend assessing for other features as well, including things like bill payment approval functionality, document management, and customizable reporting dashboards.

To find tips, tricks, and best practices for adopting a client portal in your family office, check out Best Practices to Transition Your Family Office into the Age of Digital Reporting.

A family office client portal featuring valuable financial insights can introduce a new approach to traditional family office reporting.

Better yet, when offered as an interactive, user-controlled reporting experience, family offices can engage end-clients in ways that far surpass anything paper reports provide to create contemporary, meaningful connections with current and future wealth owners.

But if you’re still debating the merits of a client portal for your family office, start by checking out the Archway Client Portal’s flexible reporting dashboards, comprehensive financial insights, and easy-to-use tools. Operating as a seamless extension of the Archway Platform, our client portal can serve as the link you need between your family office staff and the family members they serve.

Explaining the Many Roles of Family Office Consultants

The role of family office consultants is far-reaching and the range and depth of the services they offer can vary significantly. From entity and organizational structuring to technology selections and operational support, consultants can wear quite a few hats throughout the lifecycle of a family office.

While Archway Family Office Services tends to interact with consultants most commonly during due diligence, selection, implementation and ongoing usage of the Archway Platform^SM, consultants can play a much larger role that expands well beyond family office software.

Broadly grouped into three primary areas of focus, here are a few examples of how family offices can work with consultants across their businesses.

Administrative Consulting

Largely focused on formative and strategic initiatives, family offices can partner with consultants to help with traditional administrative tasks such as:

• Family office creation
• Legal entity structuring
• Tax and estate planning
• Foundation and non-profit strategy
• Governance
• Next-gen and transition planning

Administrative consulting can also span to include niche consultancy like:

• Personal security and risk assessment
• Family education
• Legacy preservation
• Executive talent search
• Travel and household management

Administrative consulting can come in the form of a one-time project or as a recurring function as restructuring and intermittent evaluations are needed.

Technology Consulting

As a 20-year veteran in the family office software space, Archway Family Office Services has the most exposure in the technology-focused area of family office consulting. Over the years, we’ve worked with a number of consultants to help family offices on their technology journey.

Technology consulting projects can include:

• Technology needs and goals assessments
• Technology strategy planning
• Database infrastructure
• Family office technology selection
• Technology implementation project management
• Cybersecurity
• Client portal development and/or implementation

Though it’s common to associate technology consulting with the more familiar accounting and investment software solutions, it can also extend to the broader family office technology ecosystem, inclusive of hyper-targeted tools like digital family office communication apps, document managers, grant-making software, CRMs, dashboard-style portals and compliance platforms.

Consultants tend to have a large network of viable solutions that they are able to take to the table and recommend based on the unique needs of each family office. For this reason, technology consulting can be a very involved, but rewarding initiative for family offices.

Operational Consulting

This type of consulting lends itself more to ongoing service than one-off consulting efforts, but is nonetheless an important function of family office consultants.

Like administrative and technology consulting, operational consulting can include a variety of functions such as:

• Technology implementation project resourcing
• Software administration
• Accounting and investment data validation and reconciliation
• Monthly financial reporting
• Tax preparation
• Annual charitable gift planning

While not all consultants can perform the operational functions in-house, most are able to advise on a trusted service provider that will be a sound, long-term partner for the family office.

Archway Family Office Services has a long history of working with family office consultants across the globe. Schedule a call with a member of our team to learn more about our family office solutions and how we can work with your preferred consultant to support you from technology evaluation to ongoing usage of Archway's Platform.

What 20 Years of Working with Family Offices Has Taught Archway Family Office Services

As the Archway Platform^SM celebrates its 20th year serving family offices, Archway Family Office Services is looking back on the lessons we’ve learned throughout two decades of client service interactions, thousands of product development hours and seemingly endless internal discussions.

Here is a list of 20 lessons we’ve learned since the Archway Platform got its launch in 2002:

1. Family offices require purpose-built accounting and investment tools. Wrought with limitations around entity consolidation, complex transaction processing, investment data aggregation and end-client reporting, industry-agnostic software is simply not designed to handle the intricacies of ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) wealth. As family offices have become increasingly sophisticated, so have our solutions, allowing our clients to handle their particular nuances like complex entity structures, multiple households, vast portfolios and diverse investments.
2. …but there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to family offices. Although it’s been said countless times before, each family office presents its own unique organizational structure, investment strategy and set of operational processes. Family office software should be flexible enough to adapt to each family office’s distinct needs.
3. Financial reporting can only be as good as the underlying data. The only way to ensure reliable reporting is to input clean, accurate data into your system of record from the start. Period.
4. We can all agree: Excel is not a long-term reporting solution. Spreadsheets permeate nearly every walk of life, but they are not sustainable when it comes to financial reporting for modern family offices. Whether the need arises out of a desire for greater automation, accuracy or security, family offices seek out applications that simplify and streamline complex reporting processes.
5. Technology presents myriad opportunities to automate key family office operations. Family office technology, including the Archway Platform, has come a long way since the early 2000s. From accounting close processes and investor allocations to bill payment approvals and wealth reporting, workflows have been built to automate an incredible number of historically manual processes—and today’s family offices demand more automation than ever before.
6. We know what we are—and what we aren’t. Archway Family Office Services delivers a comprehensive suite of accounting, investment data aggregation and reporting capabilities. We specialize in partnership, portfolio and corporate accounting alongside bill payment, investment management and multi-asset class data aggregation. We handle complex cash management, transfers and gifting and fee billing. We offer hundreds of financial statements, asset allocation overviews, performance analytics and holdings reports. But we know there’s more to a family office than what the Archway Platform can do, and we don’t strive to over-engineer our solution for a function it was never meant to perform.
7. Best of breed and integrated family office software solutions have unique benefits. Fundamentally, the Archway Platform was built to replace multiple applications. But we also know there are a variety of reasons why a family office may continue to use ancillary systems for certain functions. To help family offices interconnect their ecosystem of technology and service providers, we’ve made a significant investment over the years to create integration points with a variety of third-party applications. We’ve learned to help family offices use the Archway Platform as a standalone family office solution, or as a hub of their broader technology ecosystem.
8. Technology models should be tailored to the family office. Family offices need options when it comes to how they consume technology solutions. After all, not every family office is equipped—nor wants—to run an enterprise application. To that end, Archway Family Office Services has adapted how our clients are able to leverage the Archway Platform, allowing them to use the technology in-house, outsource the work to us or employ some combination of both in-house and outsourced resources to run the platform.
9. Technology and service evaluations require structure. Selecting a technology or service provider is never a decision that should be made lightly. Over the years, we’ve completed countless use-cases, proofs-of-concepts, questionnaires and consultative discussions, making us keenly aware of the importance of those tasks in the decision-making process.
10. Scalability is a leading consideration when making a wealthtech decision. A solution that can grow with a family office is far more viable in the long-term than a solution that meets singular needs right now. Throughout the years, we’ve implemented new tools that allow our clients to efficiently expand their usage of the Archway Platform—whether it’s the addition of entities, households, portfolios, assets, users or functionality.
11. …and outsourced services can also serve as a mechanism to help family offices create efficiency. When capacity and bandwidth run short, family offices need a strategic partner that can serve as a seamless extension of their internal team. Whether it’s an unexpected short-term gap or a long-term strategic decision, Archway Family Office Services has built an offering that allows our team to work alongside our clients through tailorable partnership administration, personal expense management, portfolio reconciliation, consolidated reporting and family office outsourcing services.
12. Technology plays a key role in business continuity—as underscored in 2020. Whether our clients were using the Archway Platform within their own four walls or working with our outsourced service teams, we found that they were well-equipped to handle the migration of their operations from in-person to remote work environments overnight. More notably, the shift reinforced the importance of a trusted, dependable technology provider that is prepared to evolve with you.
13. A family office wealthtech strategy is more than functionality. Functionality should not be the sole set of criteria used to define a family office wealthtech strategy. Our experience has illuminated the value of a clearly defined, holistic strategy that takes into account the opinions of multiple stakeholders, technology and staffing infrastructure preferences and data availability.
14. Change management is critical for a successful family office wealthtech implementation. Technology conversions require planning, resources and, most importantly, time. Ensuring that our family office clients are properly equipped to manage an implementation project is paramount to meeting deadlines and setting expectations.
15. Clients are the greatest driver of product enhancements. The Archway Platform was born out of a need for a better fund accounting solution, but the evolving needs of our clients have shaped the platform into the award-winning family office solution it is today. Their requests, recommendations and feedback have paved our product roadmap throughout the years, and continue to do so today.
16. Innovation is not a destination. Our desire to evolve and grow the Archway Platform has been omnipresent since we first entered the family office market in 2002. To this day, we continue to aggressively pursue strategic initiatives, introduce new functionality and evolve the way our clients interact with and consume our technology.
17. Product training and education are evergreen. We cannot overstate the importance of our clients and how we interact with them. Over the years, we’ve grown our library of client service mediums to include comprehensive product documentation, self-service support tools, detailed how-to guides, client-specific instructional opportunities and user training conferences—all of which are designed to provide an optimal client experience.
18. A strong family office network is priceless. The number of membership organizations, consultants and conference organizers geared towards family offices has soared, even in recent years. Creating a network of peers can be immensely helpful for family offices seeking recommendations, advice or new connections.
19. …and our family office client community is one of our greatest successes. For 20 years, we have taken a customer-first approach to our client relationships—and it shows. The impact of our dedication to exceptional client service is evident in the engagement of our client community, their peer-to-peer interactions and our long-lasting relationships with our clients.
20. Nothing compares to experience—or the relationships you build gaining it. Like most firms, we’ve felt our fair share of growing pains over the years. But with two decades of knowledge, lessons learned and success to tap into, Archway Family Office Services has developed a staying power few can afford. Our experience has taught us that nothing about family offices—or family office software—is standard, but we’ve built a reputation as a problem-solver, a frontier-leader and an esteemed strategic partner for hundreds of family offices and, in the process, we’ve reaffirmed time and time again that our connections with our clients are made to endure.

With 20 years behind us, and many more in front of us, we are excited for the next era of successes, lessons and innovations. To learn more about our experience working with family offices, schedule a call to connect with the Archway Family Office Services team.

How to Build a People-centric, Data-driven Implementation Process

At Archway Family Office Services, we often talk about the importance of data, people and process in overarching family office wealthtech strategies. But it bears repeating that this trio can—and should—be specifically applied to the implementation of family office technology solutions too.

Leveraging our extensive experience implementing the Archway Platform℠ for family offices and financial institutions serving ultra-high-net-worth families, Archway Family Office Services knows a thing or two about how the decisions related to these three core areas can impact your implementation timeline as well as the long-term viability of your chosen family office software solution.

To help your family office think through these inflection points, Archway Family Office Services has put together a short list of considerations associated with each theme: data, people and process.

Data. The foundation of your wealthtech solution.

Arguably one of the most challenging components of a wealthtech implementation project is collecting, validating and delivering data to your technology vendor. While tech shops can mitigate the impact of this step through automation, data feeds and intuitive data assembly tools, family offices can also take steps to help create a seamless conversion.

Here are a few data-focused considerations:

• Do you have a list of entities, accounts and ownership structures?
• Do you have a list of all custodial and bank accounts, including points-of-contact?
• Do you have a list of all managers for alternative investments?
• Do you know how to extract data out of legacy systems, including general ledgers, custodian portals and portfolio reporting platforms?
• Are you able to provide accurate, validated data to ensure a clean starting point in your new system?
• Do you have access to historical financial reports, including balance sheets, income statements, trial balances and custodial documents?
• Do you have records for all historical alternative investment cash flows?
• If migrating to a new accounting system, are you prepared to close out the last accounting period in your existing system?
• If migrating to a new reporting tool, is historical investment performance data readily available?

People. The engine that drives your success.

Implementing a new wealthtech solution takes equal parts skill, knowledge and resourcing. And while most people assume resourcing needs must be met internally, we’ve found that this isn’t always the case given the growing number of family office consultants that can offer capacity and expertise on an as-needed basis.

With that in mind, striking the right balance of internal and external resources is critical to ensuring that you have the right team in place to successfully complete the implementation project and perhaps, more importantly, operate the solution long-term.

Here are a few people-focused considerations:

• Who will be responsible for evaluating solutions?
• Will you engage a consultant during the technology selection?
• Who will be the ultimate decision-maker?
• Who will manage the implementation project?
• Who will support the collection, validation and delivery of data to your vendor?
• Who will oversee the successful completion of project milestones?
• Will you have a dedicated team to operate the technology post-conversion?
• Who will be responsible for communicating with the vendor, sharing product updates internally and training internal staff on how to use the solution?
• Will you outsource any components of your operations to your technology vendor or other third-party contractor?

Process. The nuances that define your operations.

If you have the data and you have the people, the final piece in the trifecta of implementation success is your process. Do you have a process defined that assembles the proper resources to collect, validate and deliver the data that is required to stand up to a new technology solution? While this may seem like overkill, keep in mind that in most cases, family office employees don’t simply abandon their day jobs during a technology implementation.

By planning a process ahead of time, and remaining flexible throughout the implementation project, you’ll be in a better position to set reasonable expectations that don’t over-burden your resources.

Here are a few process-focused considerations:

• What are the most important functions you need to perform in your new platform?
• Have you thought about how you would like to prioritize the adoption of these new functions?
• What reporting outputs do you hope to attain using your new platform?
• Have you communicated your goals to your preferred technology vendor?
• Have you worked with your internal stakeholders as well as your preferred technology vendor to set priorities and milestones?
• Have you begun change management discussions?
• Do you understand what data is required to reach project milestones?
• Is your anticipated milestone timeline achievable based on other, pre-existing responsibilities and priorities?
• How will you allocate resources to complete project milestones?
• Have you created a workflow for collecting, validating and delivering data to your preferred vendor?
• Who will sign off on the completion of project milestones?
• Have you established criteria to determine when you can effectively cut ties with your old systems and processes?

In our 20 years of implementing the Archway Platform, Archway Family Office Services has learned firsthand how impactful pre-work can be. We recognize that having data, people and processes aligned is the key to simplifying technology migrations.

By going through the exercises of organizing and preparing your data, planning resources and defining processes upfront, your family office will be better equipped to hit the ground running on your implementation project and successfully scale up your new solution.

Originally authored by Archway for publication on Family Office Exchange.

Preparing Data, People and Processes before Implementing a Family Office Solution

As purveyors of financial technology and service for wealthy families, we at Archway Family Office Services are keenly aware of the important role data migration and setup plays in achieving long-term client success.

But the process of collecting, migrating, normalizing, testing and validating data is no simple task, especially when the number of data points soar.

Nonetheless, the Archway Family Office Services Implementation Consulting team has managed to deliver hundreds of successful implementations of our family office software solution, the Archway Platform℠.

If the proof is, as they say, in the pudding, our clients have certainly put our teams to the test.

Over the past two decades, we’ve implemented established, multi-generational families with hundreds of entities and complex ownership structures and first-generation wealth owners who are in the process of structuring their new family offices. We’ve implemented large financial institutions serving hundreds of high-net-worth families and wealth advisors in the early stages of rolling out their family office practices. We’ve even implemented hedge funds, private equity funds and fund of funds.

And while we can all agree that no two implementations are alike, there are certainly common threads that stretch between each of our onboarding projects.

Following these threads and using our collective experiences, we’ve identified five potential project snags to be aware of. And, more importantly, how you can prevent them from impacting your implementation timeline. After all, who wants to hear about a problem without a solution?

1. Incomplete or low quality data.

Clean, readily-available data is the single most important asset when it comes to keeping a project timeline on track. Setting a balance forward, entering performance history and producing reports all necessitate accurate data. To avoid the crunch of data collection, it’s important to establish a process for collecting data from legacy accounting systems, custodians and other relevant data sources—prior to selecting a new wealthtech solution.

Be prepared to supply lists of entities, accounts, ownership structures, designated signers or powers of attorney, account owners, relationship managers and points-of-contact at places like banks, custodians and funds. Lastly, we recommend taking time to proactively organize key financial reports like balance sheets and custodial statements as well as historical alternative asset cash flow detail.

2. Changing requirements and expectations.

Understanding requirements, setting expectations and establishing project milestones upfront creates structure and accountability for the duration of the process. But we also know that sometimes the scope of the project may change as other business projects take priority rank, entities are reorganized, new accounts are added or reporting requirements change. In these situations, we recommend communicating any new requirements as early as possible to avoid unnecessary rework and delays.

3. Delayed deliverables and milestone reviews.

If establishing project milestones is how you build a plan, then adhering to project milestones is how you measure progress against the plan. But anticipation and excitement of what’s waiting at the finish line can make it easy to overlook the necessary steps it takes to get there.

Compounded with the fact that most project participants on the client-side still have to perform their day-to-day tasks, it can be difficult to stay on top of the reviews and approvals that are required to move the project forward.

To keep checkpoints on track, ensure that your team has the proper allocation of time and resources to uphold milestone obligations and sign off on milestone achievements. Equally important is to ensure that your chosen vendor has—at a minimum—a set of guiding principles that will dictate your path forward.

As a firm believer in this approach, Archway Family Office Services leverages a repeatable, trusted implementation process that helps formalize deliverables and measure progress as data is collected, entered, tested and validated—all in pursuit of the client’s expected results.

4. Undefined roles and responsibilities.

Selecting a technology or service provider is a project in and of itself, but it is merely a precursor to the actual implementation of your chosen solution. Avoid the dissolution of project stakeholders by embedding their participation into your project plan.

Create clear outlines of who will be responsible for collecting which components of the data, who will review the data before it is shared with your vendor and who will perform the final validation check once it’s been entered into your new system.

Balance is also key when it comes to projects of this magnitude, so assigning a dedicated project manager and an underlying project team can help build momentum towards implementation success.

5. Lengthy data rebuilds.

Historical data is a hot topic when it comes to converting records from a legacy system to a modern application. It can also be quite nuanced depending on the type of historical data requested. For instance, five years of accounting activity versus five years of performance returns are very different requests. The easiest way to avoid project delays is to understand exactly how much and what type of history you desire before beginning your project.

While many things can delay your implementation project timeline, there are also many things that can keep you on track—or, in some cases, even expedite your progress:

• Define clear requirements and desired outcomes for the project, including expectations around historical data rebuilds
• Create lists of signers, powers-of-attorney, account owners, relationship managers and points-of-contact for banking and custodial relationships
• Create a plan for collecting data
• Review data for completeness and accuracy before delivering it to your vendor
• Encourage responsiveness and timeliness across your team
• Establish an organizational structure and assign roles and responsibilities once project deliverables and milestones have been defined

But perhaps our most salient advice is to choose a vendor with experience and expertise when it comes to converting data and implementing clients onto a new solution.

Schedule a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team to learn how successfully converting hundreds of family offices and financial institutions onto the Archway Platform has armed us with a wide range of best practices and practical advice to help our clients overcome the challenges of implementing a new wealthtech platform.

Looking Beyond Functionality as You Evaluate Family Office Technology Providers

Around the holidays, lists of all kinds are plentiful. From gift ideas and holiday menus to New Year’s resolutions, it seems as though everyone is creating a list of some sort. And while these examples apply more to our personal lives than our professional careers, we can say nearly the same thing about businesses.

As we approach the end of this year and work through how we plan to execute our strategy in the coming year, nearly all of us are making our lists—and checking them twice.

For family offices and financial institutions that have set their sights on evaluating family office software and service solutions in the New Year, one of the most important lists they’ll make is their family office solution wish list.

More times than not, your list of family office solution requirements begins with the obvious: the features and functionality you hope to gain with a new solution.

But we also believe it’s important to weigh other—sometimes more intrinsic—benefits of your future long-term strategic partner.

Here are five additional ideas to add to your family office solution wish list:

1. An experienced family office solution provider that continues to innovate and grow

Whether you’re expanding your administration to include new households or family members, adjusting your investment strategy or adopting new allocation structures, your family office is constantly evolving. Your family office solution provider should too.

We recommend keeping innovation and growth near the top of your wish list to help you find a family office technology and service provider that has a clear strategic vision, a defined product roadmap and a track record of growing their family office community.

2. A trusted, reputable organization that understands the nuances of family offices and ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) wealth

Family offices and advisors to UHNW individuals and families face a unique set of challenges when it comes to the accounting, investment data aggregation and reporting operations required to manage complex wealth. By checking this box on your wish list, you’ll feel more confident that your family office solution provider specializes in and understands these specific requirements and can offer flexible, purpose-built technology and outsourced services that simplify these complexities.

3. A reliable, time-tested client service approach

Client service is more than product support. This wish list item can help you discern which family office solution providers truly create a thoughtful and rich educational experience for their clients. Keep an eye out for things like user conferences, training events, comprehensive product documentation and self-service support portals, so that you and your team can extract the full value out of the solution.

4. A family office solution provider that offers flexible technology models

At Archway Family Office Services, the Archway Platform℠ was originally marketed and sold as software-as-a-service (SaaS), meaning family offices used the software in-house. But for some family offices, a technology strategy may not mean they have a desire to run a technology platform themselves. Instead, their wish list includes finding an outsourced service provider that can perform the work while offering a technology-driven reporting experience for their staff and their end-clients.

It can be incredibly beneficial to find a family office solution provider that can do both.

5. A wealthtech system that can integrate with your broader family office technology ecosystem

Technology is not a one-size-fits-all approach and where a single system may suffice for one family office, another family office may require multiple systems that integrate together to accomplish their goals. Adding this to your wish list will help you select a solution provider that can coexist in your family office ecosystem alongside other systems and tools in a seamless, interconnected fashion.

Whether you’re prepped to launch a technology evaluation or simply planning to evaluate your existing wealthtech strategy in the coming year, Archway Family Office Services has a breadth of experience, connections and insights to help you throughout the process.

Schedule a call with a member of our team to let us help you think through your technology strategy and discover how Archway Family Office Services can create a centralized hub for your accounting, investment and reporting operations.

How to Make the Case for Buying Family Office Software at Any Stage

Long regarded as being overly complex and costly, family office software is more affordable and accessible than ever. Yet, reservations around technology implementations still plague most family offices.

Over the course of hundreds of conferences, meetings and dinners, we have frequently heard family office professionals express a thematic concern when it comes to implementing a new wealthtech solution: timing.

What if we don’t have enough resources right now to handle the implementation project?

How many hours per week should I plan to set aside for implementation-related tasks?

How will I carve out time to collect the data for the new system while continuing to perform my day job in the old system?

How long will my implementation take?

But perhaps the most salient question around timing goes something like this: When is it the right time to implement wealth management technology in my family office?

Like many things, the answer isn’t nearly as straightforward as the question. And while there’s no magic timeframe during which implementing a technology solution is better or worse, there are benefits to purchasing a technology solution at various stages of your family office’s growth.

Here are a few strategic considerations to help you make the right decision for your firm, your staff and the family members you serve.

New Family Office

Whether the family recently experienced a liquidity event or a late generation beneficiary decided to branch off to form their own shop, the early days of a family office can present a great opportunity to invest in technology for the future.

Technology selections are almost always daunting, especially when you have a fresh set of entities, a new chart of accounts and an evolving investment strategy to manage. But a worthy technology partner will be able to offer your firm a right-sized offering to start that can seamlessly grow into your long-term, multi-generational solution as your strategy develops.

By implementing a technology solution that will carry you through the years and, more importantly, the generations, your financial data will already be in place as you add entities and family members to the mix. More importantly, your flagship staff will have experience using the software to manage accounting, investment and reporting processes so that they can propagate their knowledge of the technology to newly hired staff.

Family Office with Limited Staffing

Very few family offices have the luxury of a large headcount. In our experience, it’s not uncommon for family offices to operate with one, three or five core staff members, especially as the family office just getting started. With limited resources, it can be hard to justify a technology implementation that will consume even more of your team’s valuable time.

But a small staff shouldn’t deter you from investing in state-of-the-art financial technology.

In fact, it’s perfectly reasonable to own the technology while leveraging the vendor’s supplemental outsourced services to help operate the platform, or a subset of its tools. In these scenarios, you are the owner of both the technology and the relationship inside of one solution, which lets your team focus on strategic activities while enjoying the benefits of cutting-edge software for management and client reporting.

As your headcount grows, you can begin to absorb those outsourced functions into your daily operations. Since your data is already residing on your chosen wealthtech solution, you’ll be able to avoid the process of migrating historical data from the vendor’s application of choice into your preferred solution.

Established Family Office with Rudimentary Systems

You’ve used spreadsheets and QuickBooks files for as long as you can remember. Your data has become a mess and you wouldn’t know where to begin. You can’t imagine trying to source and implement a new family office accounting and investment software.

These are all very real, and very valid, concerns—and they are why so many family offices continue to use outdated technology. But relying on outdated, clunky or non-specialized systems within a family office breaks down efficiency and introduces a greater margin of error.

A modern technology solution presents a blank slate for you to clean up and organize your data so that you can improve the efficiency and speed of your processes and the quality of your reporting. So regardless of where you’re at on the technology spectrum, it’s important to recognize the value of investing in technology that can automate and simplify how you do your work today, for a better, exceedingly less painful, tomorrow.

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Established Family Office with Existing Technology

Sometimes your technology doesn’t grow with you—or stops growing altogether—and you’re put in the position of having to find a technology partner that understands the importance of innovation and forward motion.

In other cases, sometimes things just don’t go to plan. Perhaps a less proven tech firm over-promised and under-delivered, or you got lost in the data and mismanaged deadlines. Whatever the reason, it’s important to remember that it’s never too late to start over with a better suited technology partner.

Although outgrowing or failing to get off the ground with a technology solution can be costly and frustrating, noting how it fell short, where things went wrong and how to avoid making the same mistakes again puts you in a better position for a successful technology implementation moving forward.

By building on your prior experience, you have a better grasp on what works for your organization and what hinders it. Using this knowledge, you can select a solution that provides the right combination of people, process and technology for your family office.

At Archway Family Office Services, we know that each family office faces its own challenges when it comes to selecting and implementing a technology solution. As a long-term strategic partner to family offices and high-net-worth advisory firms of all shapes, sizes and strategies, we’re prepared to understand where you’re at today, where you want to be in the future and how the Archway Platform℠ can help you get there.

Schedule a call with a member of our team to learn more about our technology and outsourced service solutions for family offices and financial institutions serving wealthy families.

Understanding the Pros and Cons of In-House Technology, Outsourced Services, or Hybrid Models

Today’s family offices have more options than ever when it comes to selecting a technology solution. From integrated wealth management technology that comprehensively handles accounting, investment data aggregation and client reporting to best of breed family office tools that provide specialized, hyper-focused capabilities, private wealth management organizations are inundated with choices.

Now, we have all heard that your technology is only as good as the data going into it, but we seldom talk about how the data is being entered, managed and reported on in the first place.

So before you choose a technology solution, it’s important to consider your overarching technology strategy. It’s worth noting that your technology strategy will cover a variety of requirements, like technology infrastructure, capabilities and reporting expectations.

But another important consideration to keep in mind is your resourcing capacity. Specifically, do you plan to run the technology internally or partner with a third-party organization to run the technology on your behalf?

To help you choose the right technology model for your family office, we’ve put together a brief description of these models alongside some thoughts on what makes them great and what makes them challenging.

In-House Family Office Technology

A far cry from on premise servers, local hard drive installations and CD-ROMs, today’s in-house technology is typically web-based software applications that are run by the family office staff. This model requires family offices to have sufficient staffing—and sufficient staffing capacity—to effectively use the software.

Pros:

• Provides greater flexibility in dictating how the data is managed

Since you and your team will be responsible for validating and reconciling the financial data piped into the technology, as well as the ultimate reporting output, in-house technology offers maximum flexibility in how the data is managed and conveyed to your end-clients.

• Gives family offices the ability to create a custom technology ecosystem

Many family offices choose to bolt multiple tools together. For instance, some family offices elect to take an integrated solution like the Archway Platform and leverage APIs to funnel data into their own data warehouse or other complementary systems like alternative investment data extraction technology, tax preparation tools and trust administration software.

Cons:

• Requires dedicated family office staff to run the technology

While some family office software solutions can easily be managed by an individual or a small group of individuals, more sophisticated technology stacks comprised of multiple systems may require additional volume and expertise.

Helpful Tip: While you can’t magically conjure more staff, you can help mitigate this drawback by thoroughly evaluating your technology strategy from the start so that you understand capacity limitations and resource availability within your family office to avoid overextending your team. Additionally, be sure to review your technology vendor’s product documentation to ensure that your team will have access to the right educational and training materials as they begin leveraging the platform more fully.

Family Office Accounting

Although more commonly seen amongst private banks aiming to enhance their HNW client service quality and establish greater scalability across their solutions, outsourcing is becoming increasingly popular amongst single family offices.

In this model, family offices partner with teams of highly-specialized accounting, investment and operations professionals to provide a full suite of family office administration services like portfolio reconciliation, bill payment, partnership accounting and client investment reporting.

Pros:

• Creates scalability and extensibility in your offering

It’s a bit of a misnomer that outsourcing is purely a means of replacing headcount. The reality is, single family offices choose to partner with trusted outsourced service providers so that they can focus on things like estate planning, investment strategies and financial literacy amongst the family members, while their outsourcing partner performs monotonous, data-focused tasks.

Additionally, as rising generations become more active in the family’s wealth story, family offices can quickly expand their services to include additional family members and households with little to no disruption amongst their internal staff.

• Provides business continuity in the event of unexpected conditions

Propelled by the winds of a global pandemic and the resulting disruption it caused to routine business processes, family offices are looking to outsourced service providers to help them uphold business-as-usual. Whether your family office faces employee departure, natural disaster or another scenario that puts your operations in limbo, an outsourced service partner can be a constant source of stability amid changing circumstances.

Cons:

• Makes changes to processes and reporting a bit more difficult

While any outsourced service provider worth its salt offers transparency into how they deliver their services, business process outsourcing (BPO) providers are successful because they create predictable, streamlined processes. After all, it’s how they maintain accuracy and efficiency in their service.

What may seem like a simple alteration in a procedure or a minor adjustment to your end-client reporting may actually turn out to be a material change to the original Service Level Agreement (SLA), which can subsequently introduce lengthy timelines and challenging change orders.

Helpful Tip: To ensure maximum satisfaction, be sure to carefully discuss SLAs with your outsourced service partner during your due diligence and re-contracting periods to ensure both sides are appropriately setting expectations that will meet—and hopefully exceed—your internal and end-client requirements.

Technology + Outsourcing Hybrid for Family Offices

Finally, a scenario where you can indeed have your cake and eat it too. For many family offices, technology is core to their operations. At Archway Family Office Services, we see hundreds of family offices whose accountants, A/P managers, investment professionals and reporting analysts rely on our technology to perform their daily objectives. We also see family offices that need an elevated level of support to make sure that their daily objectives can be met, both on an intermittent and permanent basis.

In the instance of the latter, this model allows the family office to perform a selected set of operations, while leveraging an outsourced service partner, like the Archway Family Office Services team, to perform other tasks.

Pros:

• Offers a wide variety of technology and service combinations

The hybrid model comes in all shapes and sizes, allowing family offices to create an ideal cocktail of in-house technology utilization and outsourced services. For example, if accounting is an area of inefficiency, family offices can choose to perform the bookkeeping for a subset of entities, while offloading the accounting work for more complex entities, like multi-owner family limited partnerships, private funds and other pooled investment vehicles. Or maybe accounting isn’t the issue at all.

Perhaps the volume of work needed to reconcile accounts or prepare client reports is beyond the family office staff’s capacity. Either way, a hybrid approach lets family offices take the most strenuous, time-consuming or just plain mundane tasks and hand them off to a team of capable, trustworthy subject matter experts.

• Provides a stopgap during short-term absences or times of transition

Hybrid approaches don’t have to be forever. In fact, many family offices employ these types of relationships on an as-needed basis. Should your family office find itself in a period of flux, whether it be due to parental leave, retirement or the pending appointment of a new staff member, the right outsourced service provider can quickly step in to fill the void.

This becomes even more prolific if your primary technology provider also offers outsourced services, as the delivery teams are already well-versed in the technology and likely have insight into your ongoing operations.

Cons:

• Requires flexible technology and a nimble set of operations

While some solutions are more intuitive than others, all technology is nuanced. For instance, if your technology provider charges per user, you may find it cost-prohibitive to grant access to additional third-party service providers. Similarly, if the technology solution is not equipped with APIs or data extract tools, you may find it unmanageable to share data between your platform and your service provider’s platform. And technology isn’t the only hitch.

If your operations require technology workarounds, are overly complex or lack documentation, you may find it challenging to bring outsiders up-to-speed, rendering your process transition ineffective.

Helpful Tip: When selecting a technology vendor, be sure to vet out their ability to provide supplementary services. If they are unable to offer outsourcing alternatives, request recommendations for endorsed outsourcing partners or industry consultants that have knowledge of the solution and can be relied upon to perform service contracts should the need arise.

Choosing the right technology model for your family office is key to building efficiency and enhancing the way you and your clients interact with their financial data. Whether you’re exploring family office solutions for the first time, or simply trying to understand what’s new in the market, take some time to evaluate your family office technology strategy to make sure you understand which approach will satisfy your internal staff and end-client needs in a manageable, sustainable fashion.

Originally authored by Archway for publication on Family Office Exchange.

Key Considerations for Your Family Office Technology Strategy

In the early 90s, legitimate family office software was, by all accounts, a unicorn.

At the time, there were only a handful of software platforms even partially suitable for family offices. The number of software platforms actually equipped to handle the complexities of managing and reporting on significant wealth was even fewer. Not surprisingly, family offices had limited potential when it came to digitizing and streamlining routine operations.

So for years, family offices and financial institutions serving high-net-worth clients had two options: buy ill-fitting technology for a makeshift solution or build a proprietary technology network for the sole use of their own family office.

The problem with both options was that neither offered a sound, long-term solution.

As wealthtech advanced and high-net-worth individuals began demanding access to modern family office reporting, the age-old debate of buy versus build shifted. Then, in the 2010s, the debate took on a wholly new form: buy an integrated family office platform or build a technology stack that utilized multiple best of breed family office solutions.

Fast forward to today, family offices of all sizes are actively scrutinizing their technology strategies and weighing the benefits of implementing comprehensive technology stacks that replace legacy systems with purpose-built family office technology solutions.

While some of the largest family offices have opted to engage consultants or deploy teams of resources to construct a long-term, multi-faceted solution, others have found it difficult to know where to start.

To help you get your footing, here are a few tips to consider as you jump into this lengthy, but ultimately rewarding, process:

1. Know the requirements of your family office staff and end-clients

You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint, so why would you build a technology stack without a requirements assessment?

Before you start snapping up a platform—or multiple platforms—you should have pointed conversations with your internal accountants, investment professionals, reporting analysts and family members to understand what they hope to accomplish with modern wealthtech. Equally important, you should take time to understand your team’s capacity and expertise to manage and maintain a technology solution, particularly if you plan to interlink multiple systems.

To help begin this assessment, we’ve put together a list of 50+ evaluation criteria focusing on key decision points related to technology and staffing infrastructure, data collection, functionality and reporting to help you think through your wealthtech strategy.

2. Ask other family office professionals what tools they’re using

The wealthtech landscape has grown rapidly in recent years, but not all family office technology is created equally. Take the time to reach out to your peers in the family office community, attend conferences with other wealth management professionals and chat with industry consultants to learn not only what solutions are out there, but which ones can deliver on their promises and be a trusted, reliable resource for your organization for years to come.

If you’re interested in joining a family office network, check out our blog containing a short list of family office networking and educational resources.

3. Don’t be afraid to implement your family office’s technology strategy in phases

It can be tempting to try to solve all of your problems at once, but we recommend prioritizing the most pressing issues and building out from there.

Think about it this way: if you’re primary goal is to replace your accounting software and automate investment data aggregation, it probably doesn’t make sense to prioritize implementing a client portal, particularly if there’s no data to feed it. Instead, focus on finding a solution—or a combination of solutions—that can meet your accounting, investment and client reporting demands over time.

For instance, when implementing the Archway Platform℠, we suggest that our clients configure their chart of accounts first. From there, we can work alongside the family office to set account balances, build out entity structures, activate automated data feeds and begin the process of creating internal and external reports.

Once the family office staff has met their accounting and investment data requirements, and has established consistency in their daily processes, we can revisit how to set up the Archway Client Portal so that they can begin sharing digital reporting with their end-clients.

By phasing the implementation across multiple stages, we are able to help clients focus on maintaining the integrity of the data and provide proper training on how to use the solution for existing and future needs.

4. Create an evaluation process and follow it

Whether you plan to partner with a technology consultant, create an internal task force or perform your due diligence independently, it’s important to have a process. Establish priorities, curate a list of questions to help you compare potential vendors, create technology proofs of concepts and set realistic timelines for implementing new tools in your family office or financial institution.

By understanding your organization’s requirements and how to properly vet viable solutions, you can better manage expectations around the selection process, technology implementation and the long-term vision for your wealthtech strategy.

Ready to begin strategizing and planning your family office’s wealthtech stack?

Download our short wealthtech strategy evaluation to begin assessing feasibility, needs and outputs to help you add efficiency to your internal family office operations and deliver a more insightful client reporting experience.

A Short Checklist to Help Family Offices Identify Alternative Investment Reporting Inefficiencies

Over the past decade, alternative assets have become a mainstay in the portfolios of high-net-worth (HNW) families. According to the 2020 UBS Global Family Office Report, alternative assets—which include private equity, hedge funds and real estate—make up 35% of family office portfolios.

While these investments represent a significant portion of HNW assets, they’re seldom easy to track and report on as a component of the family’s larger wealth picture. Unlike traditional investments like equities and fixed income, alternatives lack concrete public reporting requirements. As a result, investors are dependent on third-party managers to receive timely, accurate data regarding their investments.

Over time, it seems that this dependency has morphed into complacency, where delayed access to alternative asset data is an expectation and manual transcription of hard-copy documents into digital formats is a given. The reality is that the process of tracking and reporting on alternative investments has remained steadily challenging.

But as new solutions emerge and the integration between family office software platforms grows stronger, the boundaries of efficiency are being redrawn.

Still, it can be difficult to pinpoint inefficiencies within a process that has remained largely unaffected for the past decade—and not for lack of want, but for lack of available solutions.

To help family offices identify inefficient processes and manual tasks ripe for automation, Archway Family Office Services partnered with Canoe Intelligence to put together an evaluation checklist featuring questions focused on five key areas of the alternative investment reporting process.

Five Core Family Office Reporting Operations for Alternative Assets:

• Document collection
• Data access
• Data transfer and delivery
• Report creation
• Report analysis

Post-evaluation, if you’ve found that your family office—like many others—is expending too much time and too many resources manually collecting, normalizing, consolidating and reporting on its alternative assets, it may be time to consider a purpose-built technology solution.

This is where Archway Family Office Services and our friends at Canoe can help.

Using modern, automated tools like Canoe Intelligence and the Archway Platform, family offices can relieve bottlenecks and bridge gaps commonly associated with aggregating and reporting on alternative assets.

Designed to be tightly integrated, Canoe’s automated approach to digitizing printed copies of alternative investment documents helps family office professionals streamline extraction, validation and delivery of alternative asset data into the Archway Platform.

By leveraging the two systems together, users can eliminate manual data entry and automatically incorporate alternative asset data into the Archway Platform’s specialized suite of family office reporting.

Interested in diving into the benefits of Archway’s strategic partnership with Canoe?

Schedule a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team to learn more about how the integration between the Archway Platform and Canoe can help your family office streamline its alternative investment reporting process.

A Glossary of Common Terms and Phrases Used by Family Office Technology Providers

Family offices in and of themselves use a language all their own. But intermingled with technology terms, it can be difficult to understand the jargon that is regularly used to describe family office software solutions and the problems they help solve.

To help you establish a basic understanding of the terms we—and many technology firms like us—use regularly, we’ve put together a list of simple definitions so that you can feel more comfortable engaging in a discussion around family office technology.

A

Account: A portfolio managed by a financial institution or a group of like assets such as hedge funds, private equity investments or personal assets.

Aggregation: The process of assimilating data across an individual’s or family’s assets—including cash, equities, fixed income, alternative investments, real estate and personal assets—to present a total net worth picture.

Application Programming Interface (API): A set of tools that allow a family office’s entire technology ecosystem to communicate by programmatically passing secured data between applications.

B

Best of Breed Family Office Technology: A solution with a singular, business-specific function such as alternative investment data aggregation systems, real estate management software, trust accounting platforms, performance reporting applications, expense management tools and document managers.

C

Cash Management: The operation of ensuring a family office has sufficient cash flow or liquidity to cover expenses.

Client Portal: An end-client facing digital reporting tool used to present the individual wealth owner’s total net worth and overall financial position within the family office.

Consolidation: See Aggregation.

D

Data Feed: Programs that automatically retrieve data files on a recurring basis from banks, custodians, brokerage firms and other outside vendors. The files may include daily transaction activity, security pricing, reconciliation data and cash balances.

Drill-Through: The ability to access underlying detail from summary-level financial reporting dashboards. Also can be used to describe the ability to navigate from one screen to another to access supplemental or related information.

E

Entity: A legal entity such as a trust, partnership, foundation, holding company, operating company or individual that requires its own set of financial reports. Most family offices are comprised of many entities.

Exposure: An individual wealth owner’s allocation of an entity’s underlying assets.

F

Family Office Ecosystem: The complete set of technology platforms and third-party service providers that are used to run a family office.

Financial Statements: A collective term used to describe the core set of financials produced by a family office including the balance sheet, income statement, trial balance and cash flow statement. Sometimes this term is broadened to include the entire suite of family office financial reporting, which may include performance, risk, allocation, exposure and holdings reports.

G

General Ledger System: Accounting technology leveraged by family offices that uses a core chart of accounts to balance debits and credits to ultimately track and report on underlying accounting detail.

H

Hybrid Technology Model: The use of software applications by family office staff to manage core, value-add operations while leveraging an outsourcing partner to handle ancillary functions due to capacity or specialization issues.

I

Implementation: The process of standing up a technology solution to reflect the structure of your family office, including entities and their underlying accounts, ownership, investment profiles and accounting rules.

In-House Technology Model: The use of technology by family office staff to manage the full breadth of family office operations and services.

Integrated Family Office Technology: All-in-one family office systems that offer comprehensive functionality across multiple business disciplines—like accounting, investment data aggregation and financial reporting—that utilizes a single, underlying data warehouse.

Integration: See Data Feed.

Investment Reporting: The suite of reports focused on analyzing investments across the family office including reports that depict time-weighted and money-weighted performance returns, Multiple on Invested Capital (MOIC), risk analytics and other relevant investment metrics.

L

Letter of Authorization (LOA): A document granting third-parties, such as technology providers, access to client account information held by outside financial institutions.

Look-Through Reporting: A type of reporting that can be used to consolidate direct and indirect holdings across multiple entities and layers of ownership within a family office.

M

Master/Feeder Structure: See Nesting.

Mobile Responsiveness: The ability for an application to automatically adapt to fit the screen size of multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

N

Nesting: An investment, tax and family office structuring strategy whereby entities own other entities, creating multiple layers of ownership within a family office.

Net Worth: The aggregated value of an individual’s holdings including cash, equities, fixed income, alternative investments, real estate and personal assets, less any liabilities or money owed.

O

Outsourcing Model: Utilizing a third-party service provider to manage and execute the core operations of a family office.

P

Performance History: The collection of data spanning an investment’s entire lifecycle to enable inception-to-date and period-to-date performance comparisons.

Performance Reports: A subset of investment reports produced by family offices to measure the return on investment (ROI) for an individual asset or group of assets.

Portfolio: See Account.

Portfolio Management System: Financial technology used by family offices that aggregates, normalizes and reports on account (portfolio) information.

Profile: See Wealth Owner.

Proof of Concept: A compilation of use-cases designed by the family office to help them validate that a technology solution is capable of handling specific scenarios and core operations.

Q

Query: Unformatted data extracts that can be rendered in .csv or .xls formats to allow family office staff to apply custom formatting or transpose into third-party systems.

R

Reporting Dashboard: A set of on-screen reports, often customizable, that provide summary-level financial insights that are relevant to family office professionals and high-net-worth individuals. Dashboards often feature drill-through capabilities to provide quick access to underlying details.

Risk Analytics: Insights that help family offices measure an investment’s risk profile. Examples may include Sharpe Ratio, standard deviation, drawdown, alpha and beta.

S

Security: An investment or asset owned by a high-net-worth family or individual.

Security Master: The library of investments owned across a family office that are stored and categorized within a financial technology platform.

System Configuration: See Implementation.

T

Third-Party Data Aggregator: A data provider that links with thousands of banks, custodians and brokerage firms to retrieve basic financial information.

Treasury: See Cash Management.

U

User Interface: The front-end of a software application where you are able to input data and interact with the platform’s tools.

User Experience: The usability of a software application’s user interface, such as the ability to quickly add data and intuitively navigate the platform’s tools.

W

Wealth Owner: An individual family member with an ownership stake in all or a portion of the family’s assets.

Widgets: A software component, such as a reporting dashboard insert, that can be added and customized for the end-user.

Now that you have a handle on your family office fintech vocabulary, it’s time to put it into action. Schedule a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team to discuss how our family office technology and service solutions can help your family office address its accounting, investment data aggregation and financial reporting challenges.

A List of Five Client Portal Benefits for Family Offices

From a fintech perspective, a client portal is a digital tool used to present an individual’s total net worth and overall financial position.

More often than not, client portals are accessible as a standalone website or mobile app that provides an on-demand snapshot of an individual’s holdings. Most client portals use a combination of reporting elements like tables, graphs and supplemental documents to present the information in an easy-to-consume fashion.

Depending on the power of the underlying family office software and the completeness of the data, client portals can include simple data points like total account value, asset allocation and account value history, as well as more complex analytics like performance, risk and nested – or multi-layered – ownership values.

Although client portals tend to be more widely embraced by family offices working with Gen X and Millennials given their always-on, at-your-fingertips nature, they can also be beneficial for family offices serving older generations.

This has become increasingly evident given the widespread adoption of remote work environments in 2020, particularly as family offices are seeking to digitize specific processes like bill payment approvals and recurring report delivery.

In this new paradigm where physical distance is being supplemented by digital technologies, client portals are becoming an invaluable asset in the client service toolkit.

So what are the core benefits of using a client portal in your family office? Here’s our shortlist:

1. Customized Client Experience

A well-designed client portal will offer family offices the ability to deliver a personalized client experience for each family member using configurable dashboards, custom data groupings and optional functionality.

2. Frictionless Client Engagement

Allow family members to seamlessly participate in family office operations like bill payment approvals using an intuitive, elegant solution designed specifically with the end-client in mind.

3. Secure Data Sharing

Client portals use encrypted data and multi-level security protocols to reduce the risk associated with sharing highly-sensitive financial information between family office staff and end-clients.

4. Self-Service Access

Clients can access financial reporting and investment insights on-demand without requiring a phone call or email exchange with your family office team.

5. Digital Document Storage

In addition to on-screen reporting, many client portals feature document repositories where you can easily share monthly or quarterly reporting as well as other third-party documents.

In short, client portals help alleviate manual touchpoints and simplify how family offices communicate financial information to their end-clients.

Ready to explore a client portal for your family office? Check out the Archway Client Portal to discover how the Archway Platform and its digital reporting tools can help your family office modernize its financial reporting operations and deliver an engaging, interactive reporting experience to your end-clients.

Uncovering Key Benefits of Integrated and Best of Breed Fintech Models

If you currently are – or ever have – evaluated family office technology, you’ve probably heard the terms “integrated” and “best of breed” used to describe various solutions in the marketplace. But despite their frequent usage, they’re often misinterpreted during the family office technology evaluation process.

Unfortunately, this common misinterpretation can lead to flawed technology decisions that lack a proper understanding of the two options and their downstream implications.

On the bright side, if you’ve found yourself struggling to understand which tech stack may be the right fit for your family office or financial institution, you’re not alone.

To help potential fintech buyers better understand this technical terminology – and how it will impact their internal processes, data aggregation and reporting – we’ve put together some basic definitions of the two system architectures along with a few of their unique benefits.

Integrated Model

Integrated solutions typically refer to all-in-one systems. They tend to offer comprehensive functionality across multiple business disciplines while utilizing a single, underlying data warehouse that is managed and maintained by the technology vendor.

Said differently, integrated software means that most of the data is collected, processed and analyzed within one technology solution.

Sometimes referred to as enterprise systems, integrated solutions are designed as standalone platforms that can serve the back, middle and front office. As a result, family offices and financial institutions are able to consolidate accounting and investment data within a single database for end-client reporting purposes.

This type of solution is often sought after by firms who are looking to eliminate what are known as swivel chair processes, which is to say duplicative data entry across multiple, specialized systems. These systems may include a general ledger, a tax system, spreadsheets, an investment performance tool and a report writer – all of which have to be used together to produce holistic reporting both internally and for their end-clients.

Oftentimes, these firms cite the data input and reconciliation processes as cumbersome and error prone, and thus are looking to minimize the number of systems and vendors that are required to do their job.

By implementing an integrated technology system that marries their accounting, tax, investment and client-facing teams, the firm essentially creates a single system of record, which in turn helps them streamline their reporting processes. But there are other benefits to consider too, including:

Automation, automation, automation

Using a single system for both accounting and investment detail typically allows you to leverage automated data entry. For instance, the Archway Platform^SM is built on a core general ledger, with each of the surrounding modules – or sub-ledgers – representing a specific business function.

As users perform these non-accounting operations – like stock purchases, changing security prices, calculating fees, receiving private equity distributions, transferring cash and paying bills – the journal entries behind each of these operations are automatically generated and booked to the GL based on a series of user-defined accounting rules.

This means accountants can eliminate the month-end process of copying balances – like dividends (qualified and non-qualified), income (taxable and non-taxable), unrealized gains/losses, custodial fees and cash – from their standalone portfolio management system into their standalone general ledger, which makes for effortless recordkeeping.

One support team for all

When multiple technologies or services are used within an organization, customer support can become messy. Lacking a centralized helpdesk or hotline, users have to reach out to each of the unique support teams and act as the liaison between vendors in the event a problem extends across multiple solutions.

With an integrated solution, the client service team is knowledgeable on the full breadth of capabilities within the application taking the onus off of you to identify, triage and solve any issues yourself.

Consolidated data at your fingertips

Unless you’re planning to use in-house resources to spin up and maintain your own data warehouse fed by custom integrations with bespoke tools and services, multiple systems means multiple databases. And multiple databases means manual consolidation. On the flipside, an integrated fintech platform stores your accounting and investment data within a vendor-managed database.

Using the Archway Platform as an example, this means that you can generate ad hoc data extracts and formatted reports like financial statements, net worth and cash summaries, performance and alternative investment metrics and target to actual allocation compliance on-demand – and, better yet, you can do it across all of your entities, accounts and investments.

No technical IT background required

If you do in fact have a dedicated IT team at your disposal to manage a reporting database, integrating multiple systems together may be a non-issue. But, if you don’t, integrated fintech solutions typically mean that the solution is developed, maintained and hosted by the technology vendor. As such, you nor your team need a technical IT background to begin using the platform in-house for your accounting, investment data aggregation and reporting needs.

And you certainly won’t be responsible for future development and upgrades. That said, integrated solutions are multi-faceted and contain broad spectrums of functionality, so it’s important to understand your fintech vendor’s approach to product development and where they plan to focus their attention in the future before diving into a partnership with them.

Best of Breed Model

Best of breed intuitively means the best product of its type.

Instead of consolidating multiple business disciplines within a single application, the best of breed model takes an integrated solution and splits each of the business-specific functions into its own unique tool. Each of the tools perform a highly-specialized operation independent of the other tools.

Examples of best of breed tools include alternative investment data aggregation systems, real estate management software, trust accounting platforms, performance reporting applications, expense management tools and document managers. As expected, this model features a significantly larger technology stack than an integrated technology solution as it includes more standalone systems.

Because each of these tools typically utilizes its own vendor-managed database, one of the most important considerations for this type of technology model is your organization’s ability to support a complex data warehouse.

This type of model is best suited for firms that have the resources needed to establish and troubleshoot connections between the systems and the underlying database, normalize disparate, unstructured data from multiple systems and develop highly-customized reporting across thousands of data objects and fields.

However, harnessing the power of multiple best of breed solutions has clear benefits:

Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility

While integrated fintech solutions provide clear structure, a reporting warehouse receiving data from multiple best of breed systems provides unencumbered flexibility. Surprisingly, this degree of flexibility is often needed by firms with particularly rigid reporting objectives that are better served using a high-degree of firm-specific customizations.

Using a homegrown database means firms can collect seemingly endless data points from various systems, which can then be computed and reported on according to their unabridged requirements.

Separation of duties (and risk)

For some wealth management firms, bifurcating responsibilities across multiple function-specific technologies is a requirement. For this reason, best of breed solutions are a natural fit as each functional team can select the technology system that most adeptly meets their needs. Furthermore, by extricating ancillary users from certain operational platforms, firms can limit their risk exposure and manage regulatory compliance with confidence.

Quick road to buy-in

Because integrated technology solutions are meant to be used by multiple teams, they tend to require interdepartmental agreement on the final purchase decision. In contrast, best of breed solutions are typically geared for a single purpose, making majority buy-in easer to achieve. One downside is that when teams begin making technology purchases independent of one another – and without consideration of one another – the technology stack can become disjointed and unwieldy.

And a fragmented tech stack equals lost time, lost money and lost resources. That said, if your goal is to unify the whole of your best of breed systems, it’s important that each technology decision be made for the greater good of the overall tech stack to ensure that things like system connectivity, data flow, database organization and reporting outputs aren’t jeopardized or diminished in the long run.

It’s cheaper – wait, really?

Cost seems like a counterintuitive benefit when you’re talking about purchasing the best products in the market, but the rationale is simple: when implementing best of breed systems, firms can prioritize which system (or systems) should be implemented first, and incrementally add additional tools to their technology stack. This, in turn, spreads out the cost over a longer period of time. Keep in mind though, the cost of multiple systems will eventually add up.

Although the upfront cost of an integrated solution may be more than a single best of breed tool, the long-term investment in integrated, multi-purpose technology may pose cost-savings over a multi-platform tech stack.

At Archway Family Office Services, we believe that our solutions should be both integrated and best of breed.

Why? Because we know that a powerful tool like the Archway Platform is made stronger by its connections with other solutions that help our clients be more efficient, insightful and confident in their roles.

So whether you choose to replace multiple systems with the Archway Platform and our supporting services, or whether you choose to use our solution as the hub of your technology stack, we’re here to help you build a family office technology ecosystem that befits your family office or financial institution.

Interested in learning more about how Archway’s Platform can fit into your technology strategy? Watch the Archway Platform demo or schedule a call with a member of our team to start a conversation.

How 3 Family Offices Used the Archway Platform’s Parameter-Driven Reporting Suite to Create Custom Client Report Packages

As we head into the New Year, many of us are deep into 2021 planning. And as we plan for our future, it’s traditional to reflect on which processes have worked well throughout the past year and which ones could use some refining.

Throughout our long history working with family offices and financial institutions, we often see our clients use the start of a new year as a time to reevaluate their accounting and investment reporting functions, including how they can leverage the Archway Platform^SM to better perform these functions in the coming year. We’ve found that our clients tend to focus on details like:

• Reporting Content: Are we providing each family member with financial reports that are meaningful and relevant? Are there new reports that we could introduce to the family? Is there a report that needs to be fine-tuned for better comprehension?
• Data Classifications: Do investment groupings need to be updated to reflect newly acquired asset types? Is there a better, or more appropriate, classification structure for family investments? Are certain individuals interested in customizing the way their financial data is grouped on their reporting?
• Report Delivery: Does the existing report delivery method still make sense? Is the family interested in adopting digital reporting?
• Reporting Operations: Could we be automating manual processes using advanced technology, like the Archway Platform’s report preparation and scheduling tools?

Whether it’s a small tweak to legacy reports or a complete client reporting overhaul, Archway’s family office software helps our users continuously improve their client reporting experience. Using a controlled customization approach, our report library features 200+ parameter-driven reports that range from traditional financial statements to performance, allocation, exposure, risk and activity reporting.

In lieu of starting with a blank canvas, each report includes a list of pre-defined options that allow users to tailor reports in a manageable fashion. Among the hundreds of configuration options across the reporting suite, users can customize reports with user-defined data groupings, adjustable date ranges, performance and fee calculation options and flexible report layouts.

Fun Fact

A single report within the Archway Platform can be rendered hundreds of different ways depending on each user’s unique parameter selections.

So if your family office or financial institution is thinking about making some changes to its client reporting going into 2021 — whether it’s what information you’re presenting or the way you’re presenting it — here are a few ways our clients have found success using the Archway Platform to support their reporting processes.

MINI CASE STUDY #1

Creating a Consistent Reporting Experience Across Households

OVERVIEW

A family office had been using the Archway Platform for two years when they decided to enhance their client reporting. Prior to implementing the platform, the family office staff primarily used a compilation of spreadsheets to produce reports for 20+ family members, but struggled to maintain the custom requests and level of detail necessary to satisfy each individual.

The Vice President of Investments engaged Archway Family Office Services’ Client Services team to design a report package that could be produced for each individual family member with the click of a button.

OBJECTIVE

At a high level, the family was interested in three key financial insights: holdings, investment allocation and performance. The family was indifferent to position-level detail and preferred to view their financial reports summarized by asset category, portfolio and manager. Additionally, the family office wished to create unique report naming and asset category nomenclatures that would resonate with the family members.

Ideally, the report package would be versatile enough to satisfy each family member’s distinct expectations while ensuring a consistent, repeatable reporting experience across households.

RESULT

Using the Archway Platform’s report building tools, the Client Services team and the VP of Investments worked together to create a standard report package for the family. After consulting with Archway’s reporting experts, it was ultimately decided that the package would include nine (9) unique reports depicting:

• Summary asset allocation, period activity and change in account value
• Portfolio-level holdings grouped by custom asset categories
• Manager-level investment details compared to benchmarks
• Historical holdings over time
• Investment allocation comparisons across distinct time periods
• Current against target allocations
• Trailing investment performance summary
• Detailed manager performance
• Alternative investment overview including capital activity, market values and performance returns (MOIC and XIRR)

Using the Archway Platform’s report preparation tool, the family office staff completed a one-time configuration for each of the reports and compiled them into an organized report package including custom commentary and disclosures. Today, that report package is automatically generated and, in some cases, electronically delivered to each of the family members on a quarterly basis.

As new reports become available in the platform or as family members request more reporting customizations, the family office staff can easily add to, and tailor, the existing, pre-configured report package.

MINI CASE STUDY #2

Digital Delivery of Quarterly Trust and Personal Wealth Reporting

OVERVIEW

A multi-generational family office selected the Archway Platform to help them provide comprehensive financial reporting that could look through multiple entity levels – or layers of ownership. In addition to establishing their internal corporate reporting – including GAAP statements for creditors, cash flow statements, management reporting and line of business reporting – the family office sought to produce enhanced client reporting.

Using the self-service Archway Platform Documentation Center inside of the Client Support Portal in conjunction with one-on-one consulting with the Client Services team, the family office created consolidated reporting for nine (9) family members across two (2) generations.

OBJECTIVE

The family office’s chief focus was to illustrate holdings and investment performance. With heavy allocations towards private equity, they also wanted to include in-depth analysis of their alternative investments. Due to the differing reporting preferences across the two generations, the family office wanted to design multiple report packages.

RESULT

The family office was able to successfully construct two report packages that are delivered to each family member on a quarterly basis. The internal staff selected five unique reports that focus on asset allocation, investment performance, private equity analysis, consolidated holdings and portfolio detail. The family office was able to add efficiency to their reporting process by leveraging uniform – or global – parameters across all of the reports, and making individual adjustments where needed.

• Report Package 1 contains a snapshot of their assets and performance across their respective trusts.
• Report Package 2 is tailored to the individual family member and reflects their personal net worth consolidated across assets, portfolios and entities. The family office retains the standard set of reports, but leverages unique parameter selections for enhanced detail and personalized performance metrics.

Using the Archway Platform’s branding tools, the family office includes a cover page with personalized imagery and report package names. These packages are electronically generated and delivered through the Archway Client Portal’s document manager, providing family members with on-demand access to their quarterly reports.

As each generation’s preferences change, the family office is able to quickly and easily adapt using the wide array of parameters that enable them to collapse, exclude and add detail to the existing report packages.

MINI CASE STUDY #3

Look-Through Reporting Across Trusts and Investment Partnerships

OVERVIEW

As a newly-established family office with a growing number of investment partnerships, the Chief Operating Officer selected the Archway Platform for its renowned partnership accounting tools and its ability to scale and adapt to the firm’s processes as their family office staff grew. The COO required a solution that could look through multi-layered ownership across various legal entities and allocate P/L down to the individual family members in a consolidated fashion.

OBJECTIVE

The family office wished to establish a consistent reporting process for the multi-generational family that included 25 family members across seven households. Given the firm’s diverse entity structures – ranging from trusts and foundations to investment partnerships and a managing company – and multiple asset types, they needed a sophisticated reporting engine to be able to account for and consolidate all of this financial information.

RESULT

Using variations of five (5) different reports available in the Archway Platform’s reporting suite, the family office was able to configure a report package containing eight (8) distinct client reports.

Additionally, the platform’s powerful look-through capabilities enabled the family office staff to prepare consolidated reporting across individual’s trust and partnership assets, while delivering a comprehensive view for the family’s principal that shows consolidated holdings across the entire family and their legal entities.

The family office’s report package includes:

• Overall exposure across equities, alternatives, real estate and collectibles
• Historical allocation with side-by-side comparisons
• Investment performance against benchmarks
• Allocation compared to investment mandates

Based on a pre-defined runtime schedule, the Archway Platform automatically generates the report packages on a quarterly basis. Upon completion, the report packages are reviewed by the family office staff before being distributed to the family members.

Interested in enhancing your high-net-worth reporting experience? Find out how the Archway Platform's investment reporting capabilities can help your family office or financial institution create a scalable, sustainable reporting process.

DISCLAIMER: These case studies describe the attributes of a specific Archway Family Office Services client based on objective criteria, including organizational goals, product offering and asset size. Discussion of results is intended to help clients understand Archway’s customized approach and capabilities and should not be regarded as representative of the experience of other clients nor indicative of future results.

An Inside Look into the Relentless Development Philosophy at Archway Family Office Services

This isn’t surprising: long-lasting technology companies, those that thrive amid changes and challenges, are the ones that meet the demands of their clients over and over again without disrupting the way they operate.

This obviously implies ongoing accessibility to the technology as changes take place, but it also alludes to the intentional design and development of features and functionality that build efficiencies and make a user’s job easier. Where’s the value in a change that doesn’t align with — or unnecessarily distracts from — the solution’s core mission?

As advocates of transparency, especially when it comes to product development, we know how compelling a unique and forward-looking strategic vision can be for family offices and financial institutions. But we also strongly believe that an organization’s strategic vision should seek to enhance, not clutter, the capabilities of a platform.

At Archway Family Office Services, our commitment to intentional innovation is embodied by our Relentless Development Philosophy. When you look back on the past two decades of the Archway Platform^SM, the evolution of the product has always been channeled through a long-term vision.

Our resolve to adhere to this vision and to avoid diversions along the way ultimately afforded us the staying power that we have today as an award-winning family office solution within the broader Archway solution suite.

As a part of this ongoing process, there are a few guiding principles that help us deliver meaningful, if not incremental, improvements to our clients.

User Feedback

Technology companies don’t withstand the test of time by making assumptions. Period. They use data, analytics and tangible user insights to establish and prioritize critical enhancements. Through focus groups, enhancement requests and everyday client service interactions, Archway Family Office Service has amassed a wealth of enhancement requests and leverages these requests internally to help drive our strategic roadmap for the Archway Platform.

Peer Dialogue

Many organizations believe that internal disagreements negatively impact a business. But we think a dose of healthy opposition leads to some of the greatest product outcomes.

We engage with internal stakeholders across the entire lifecycle of a client — from the sales and marketing teams that help them begin their buying journey to the client service personnel that deliver ongoing product and service support — to ultimately derive the right balance of function and flair when it comes to product enhancements. This is evident in our current effort to redesign the Archway Platform’s user interface scheduled to be released in December 2020.

The interplay of these dynamics puts our internal release committee in a position to design a product roadmap with input from advocates of system power users with complex problems as well as proponents of simple, easy-to-understand solutions. The result is well-rounded innovation.

Frequent Upgrades

Firms that can successfully combine constructive user feedback and the internal exchange of ideas are more likely to deliver effective product enhancements and upgrades that align with the solution’s core mission. And the frequency at which firms release these product upgrades is a key driver in letting users know the value their fintech provider places in product development.

At Archway Family Office Services, we upgrade the Archway Platform on a regular basis through both minor and major releases throughout the year, amounting to hundreds of enhancements on an annual basis. By delivering incremental enhancements seamlessly and often, clients gain access to better tools while not missing a beat in executing their daily operations.

To ensure our clients are aware and up-to-date on these major improvements, we provide complete release notes and documentation through our client support portal. By being transparent and thorough in explaining our upgrades, our clients are able to trust that each change is an intentional improvement to the solution.

So how does this all play out in real life?

Download our latest mini ebook, Our Perspectives: A Relentless Development Philosophy, to learn more about our future of innovation.

A List of Capabilities to Look for in an Accounts Payable Solution

In a different blog post, we highlighted five reasons to use an outsourced bill pay provider. But what about the family offices and financial institutions that prefer to use internal staff to manage their client bill pay operations?

For those managing this function internally, it typically requires you to maintain lengthy vendor lists, process large numbers of transactions and produce time-consuming expense reports. Even with dedicated staff, these operations can be a huge drain on your team.

So with other tasks at hand, how do you save time and resources?

Accounts payable technology.

There are plenty of accounts payable solutions available to family offices, ranging from comprehensive software suites to function-specific online tools. In an ideal world, your accounts payable functions like cash management, bill payment, approval workflow and reporting should reside within your broader family office accounting software package. But, sometimes there are operational reasons why these functions are kept separate.

In these situations, your AP solution should, at the very least, integrate with your family office accounting and reporting platforms.

Whether you are evaluating a comprehensive family office fintech platform or a best-of-breed accounts payable tool, consider the following capabilities to help you create efficiencies and automate manual bill payment processes.

8 Must-Have Accounts Payable Features

1. Automated workflow

Paying bills on behalf of high-net-worth families and individuals requires rigorous controls and processes. Automated workflow around common AP tasks like invoice review, accounts payable data entry, invoice approval, payment settlement and cash flow reporting allows you to define complex processes and multi-level approval hierarchies to ensure that no review is overlooked.

2. Client portal with digital payment approval

Client portals are gaining popularity among family offices and advisors working with HNW clients. While they are primarily used for reporting purposes, some client portals also feature tools that allow end-clients to interact with their advisors. For example, the Archway Platform^SM features a client portal that allows family members to view invoices, approve vendor payments and monitor their expenses.

Users can also configure pre-approval rules or set dollar limit thresholds for specific vendors or recurring payments. Using these tools, you can digitize manual processes, like phone calls and signatures, and smooth otherwise clunky AP procedures.

3. E-signatures

The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing physical distance has shed new light on the need for digital tools that allow family offices to ensure continuity across business processes, especially essential functions like bill payment. Leveraging an AP solution that securely stores e-signatures enables permissioned system users to immediately apply signatures to checks once approval criteria is met.

This creates a fluid digital process, and eliminates the need for family members or account holders to be physically present for check signing.

4. Audit trail

An audit trail offers a complete history of any system transaction, including bill payments. Since family offices and financial institutions have a legal and fiduciary obligation to protect client assets, audit trails help ensure that they are tracking who, when and where a payment was issued.

5. Document manager

For wealthy families, there is usually a high volume of vendor invoices and bank statements related to various accounts, credit cards, properties and assets. Combined with weekly expense reports and other AP documents, files accumulate quickly and risk getting misplaced in convoluted file structures. Through a centralized document vault, users can securely upload, categorize and share relevant AP-related documents.

6. Various payment methods

Depending on how your firm pays bills or moves cash on behalf of individual family members, finding an accounts payable solution that offers various payment methods is key. Whether you use paper checks or electronic payments like ACH files and wires, your solution should offer the right method for your bill payment process.

7. Accounts payable and cash flow reporting

Fintech platforms with integrated accounts payable tools tend to offer a greater selection of internal and end-client reporting options — from AP-specific reports to a broader suite of family office financial reporting.

Using the Archway Platform, you are able to produce investment and net worth reporting alongside expense reports by bill type or vendor, invoice aging and consolidated cash summaries to determine when payments are due, which accounts are affected and how it impacts your client’s expense trends for the reporting period. Meanwhile, end-clients can access a complete analysis of their financial health including their cash balances, expenses and spending habits.

8. Cash management straight-through-processing (STP)

Every family office has a different process for moving cash, whether it’s between internal accounts or to outside parties. Depending on your own process, it’s worth considering whether your AP solution offers straight-through-processing for seamless cash movements. If your firm deals with a high volume of transactions or a substantial number of international payments, the STP approach can eliminate several manual touchpoints throughout the payment process and speed up the delivery of cash.

By finding an accounts payable solution that checks the appropriate boxes for your firm’s unique bill payment and cash management processes, you can spend less time on manual AP processes while ensuring secure, timely management of the family’s bill payment needs.

Interested in finding a family office software solution with integrated accounts payable capabilities? Learn more about the Archway Platform and its purpose-built accounts payable tools.

Useful Tools to Help Simplify Partnership Accounting for Wealthy Families

Family limited partnerships are one of the most common organizational structures among family offices and wealthy families. Unlike trusts which are managed by outside trustees and fiduciaries, they allow the family to retain control over their investments, while reducing tax impacts, protecting assets and streamlining the transition of wealth.

Despite their appeal, the accounting behind family partnerships poses distinct challenges for family offices and advisors to high-net-worth families, especially when it comes to partner allocations, capital activity, changes in ownership and nested relationships.

Without the right partnership accounting solution in place, partnership accounting operations become increasingly manual, time-consuming and overwhelming.

As a family office fintech provider, we understand the common challenges associated with partnership accounting and have spent the past two decades refining the Archway Platform^SM to adeptly handle the most complex partnership accounting scenarios — from side pockets and sleeves to multi-layered ownership and sophisticated allocation structures.

Based on our experience delivering partnership accounting technology and outsourced partnership accounting solutions, we put together a short list of capabilities to be on the lookout for as you evaluate potential partnership accounting solutions for your family office or high-net-worth client.

1. Flexible Allocation Methods

Allocation methodologies can depend based on internal business rules and partnership agreements. Choose a partnership accounting solution that gives you a variety of options for income and gain allocations to accommodate your specific requirements.

For instance, Archway Platform users can choose from four unique income allocation methods including by capital account, by committed capital, by called capital and by units, and four unique gain allocation methods including the option to mirror the income allocation method, by full or partial netting and by tax layering.

2. Automated Ownership Calculations

Ownership oftentimes changes throughout the lifecycle of a partnership through investor contributions, withdrawals or holdings transfers. Rather than having to manually calculate and track changes in spreadsheets, a sophisticated partnership accounting solution will automatically calculate the changes in ownership based on activity entered into the system.

As a result, your family office can deliver reporting across the partnership and the underlying partners that accurately depicts each partner’s pro rata ownership of the partnership’s assets as of a point in time.

3. Multi-Layer Relationships

Keeping track of the relationships between partnerships and their owners can be a complex process, particularly when entities own other entities within master-feeder or partnership-investor structures. At Archway, we refer to these multi-layer relationships as nesting. Advanced partnership accounting technology like the Archway Platform helps you untangle the web of nested relationships, and all other ownership structures within the family office.

This functionality helps family offices allocate profit and loss from the top-level entities down to the individual partners and ultimately deliver clear, concise reporting for the partnerships and the underlying partners.

4. Advanced Partnership Reporting

Reporting on investment partnerships is a complicated task that is only compounded by a lack of advanced partnership accounting technology. As you evaluate partnership accounting solutions, look for a solution with integrated reporting tools that give you on-demand access to consolidated partnership and individual partner reporting.

We recommend asking for report samples to confirm the availability of financial statements, general ledger reports, investment performance analyses, partner statements and tax detail reports.

5. Outsourced Partnership Accounting Service

Family office partnership accounting solutions can be delivered in a variety of formats — from partnership accounting software to specialized outsourced service offerings. Even if you plan to implement an in-house partnership accounting software for your family office staff, ask if the provider offers an outsourced partnership accounting service option as well.

Outsourced partnership accounting services help provide accounting and reporting continuity in the event of a sudden or unplanned loss of staff, reassigned job responsibilities or simply not enough bandwidth across the family office. By selecting a provider that can deliver both technology and service solutions, you can ensure your partnership accounting needs will always be met.

Within Archway Family Office Services, we offer both. Our team of accounting and tax professionals are trained to serve as a seamless extension of our clients’ in-house staff to provide assistance with partnership accounting operations like capital activity processing, book and tax allocation management, tax reporting and 704(c) tracking.

While investment partnerships and the supporting partnership accounting operations vary from firm to firm, leveraging a purpose-built partnership accounting software or service can help you flexibly handle a wide variety of partnership accounting scenarios within a single, dedicated solution.

Interested in learning more about the Archway Platform's integrated partnership accounting capabilities?

Discover the platform's purpose-built partnership accounting tools.

4 Mini Case Studies Highlighting the Benefits of an Integrated Accounting and Investment Platform

Beginning in March 2020, tens of millions of American workers migrated to remote work environments as a result of the global pandemic. Several months later, as the country reopens and employers begin executing their back-to-office strategies, the idea of remote work is gaining traction as a part of a long-term strategy for employers who are acknowledging the benefits of working from home.

But operating in a remote work environment has its own set of challenges and requires, among many things, technology and systems that help employees perform their daily tasks.

For some family offices, the transition has exposed inefficiencies in their accounting, investment data aggregation and reporting processes as they’ve been forced to use read-only spreadsheets and found themselves locked out of accounting files in single-user accounting systems.

For other family offices — those with a fluid technology stack — the past few months have reinforced the importance of flexible, web-based technology platforms. Among these modern family offices, the accounting and investment teams have been able to seamlessly collaborate and deliver uninterrupted financial reporting to the family members and family office leaders.

At Archway Family Office Services, we felt that it was important to understand and demonstrate the value of an integrated family office software platform — both in the remote work environment of today and in its more general purpose of helping family offices become more efficient.

But we didn’t want this to be from our perspective. Rather, we wanted to present the value of the Archway Platform^SM from the perspective of one of our family office clients.

So we reached out to a prominent family office client located in Houston, TX to understand how the Archway Platform has helped them address key pain points and, more recently, helped them smooth their transition into a remote work environment.

Below, we outline four mini case studies based on their experience.

An Introduction to the Family Office

Archway Family Office Services is dedicated to the confidentiality and privacy of our clients. To ensure anonymity, we will refer to the client as Family Office, the Family Office Controller as Carrie and the Family Office Tax Manager as Elizabeth.

The client is a single family office providing investment, tax, financial reporting, estate planning and financial planning services to three generations consisting of 20 family members. The family office manages more than $400M in assets including equities, fixed income, private equity, hedge funds, real estate and personal assets.

Prior to running the Archway Platform in-house, the Family Office partnered with Archway Family Office Services to receive monthly financial reporting through our outsourced consolidated reporting service. As they added new resources to the internal Family Office team, they looked to expand their use of Archway’s family office solution.

They ultimately elected to license the Archway Platform for in-house use of its integrated general ledger, automated data feeds, investment data aggregation and reconciliation tools, partnership accounting and financial reporting functionality.

The Family Office has been successfully operating the Archway Platform for three years and its in-house team is currently comprised of five staff members, four of which use the system.

Mini Case Study #1: Automated Investment Data Aggregation

Problem: Prior to partnering with Archway Family Office Services, the Family Office staff was responsible for manually aggregating financial data. This required logging into each of the family member’s accounts to retrieve bank and brokerage statements, and manually preparing valuation statements for the Family Office’s tax manager, Elizabeth.

This process was time-consuming and required both the aggregated investment data and copies of the account statements to be stored on a shared network, which posed accessibility issues and limited the number of users that could modify the data at any one point in time.

Solution: The Archway Platform automatically receives position, trade and cash detail from custodians and banks on a nightly basis. The Archway Family Office Services team, not the client, is responsible for monitoring system integrations, ensuring that data is received on time and acting as an intermediary between the client and the data provider to address any errors or exceptions.

The platform also generates the underlying journal entries associated with each transaction type, which are automatically booked to the general ledger. As a result, Carrie and Elizabeth have immediate access to updated and complete financial information — aggregated across all of the family members and family office entities, including family limited partnerships, investment partnerships, trusts and the family foundation — every morning.

And since the Archway Platform allows multiple users to work within the system at the same time, Carrie and Elizabeth are able to perform their job functions within the platform simultaneously.

Mini Case Study #2: Integrated Investment and Tax Data

Problem: Though Carrie and Elizabeth have unique roles within the Family Office, they both contribute to three primary family office functions: income tax compliance, financial management and reporting across all of the family’s legal entities. With a less sophisticated solution in place, the team was forced to plan and communicate who would be working inside each of the entities at any given time to avoid overlap and potential loss of data.

Further compounding the situation, the Family Office lacked integrated systems, making the process of capturing investment detail, including gains/losses, dividend and interest income and alternative investment cash flows, problematic. Carrie was spending time manually collecting and updating investment activity and market values in one place before feeding it to Elizabeth, who was manually recording and reconciling income statement and nested ownership activity in another place.

At some point, all of this information had to be shared and consolidated for compliance and reporting purposes — a tall order if Carrie and Elizabeth operated in the same office, but even more challenging when one or both worked remotely. All in all, it was a lackluster solution for fusing the investment and tax sides of the Family Office together.

Solution: Functioning as a single system of record for accounting and investment detail, the Archway Platform inherently allows multiple users to work in the software and use the same tools simultaneously without impeding other users’ activity in the system. More importantly, the prior day’s investment activity is available in the morning alongside the system-generated journal entries.

From there, the Family Office is able to seamlessly collaborate through a tag team approach of inputting and interpreting information in the system — whether through the searchable and filterable GL and portfolio transaction databases or through formatted reports. The family office is able to limit the number of back and forth exchanges related to sensitive financial information and, instead, focus on fulfilling their financial management, tax compliance and client reporting functions.

Mini Case Study #3: Comprehensive Financial and Net Worth Reporting

Problem: Consolidated financial reporting is one of the core — and most challenging — functions of the Family Office. With the family’s investments spanning multiple asset classes and three generations of deeply nested ownership, reporting was complex. Factor in manual investment tracking, clunky data input methods and convoluted Excel spreadsheets, and you’re looking at a burdensome — and largely inflexible — reporting process.

A process that could be unhinged if someone was out of the office, a file was corrupted or a step in any part of the procedure was missed. As reporting expectations among family members began to shift — specifically towards digital reporting tools — it became clear that the Family Office’s legacy reporting process would not be sustainable much longer.

Solution: The Archway Platform’s powerful reporting engine is designed to ease the burden of financial and net worth reporting for family offices. Using the platform’s database of accounting and investment detail, Carrie can produce net worth, holdings and asset allocation reporting for individual family members and households, while Elizabeth can produce financial statements, gain/loss reporting and partnership capital and tax account detail.

Since reporting can be generated at various levels, including position, individual and user-defined group, Carrie and Elizabeth are able to perform multi-level analysis. The Family Office has access to 200+ configurable parameter screens to customize reporting, making it easier to fulfill the requests of different households and generations.

The platform’s reporting tools also enable the Family Office to configure recurring monthly, quarterly or annual report packages that can be scheduled and delivered automatically. Given the web-based nature of the application, users with the proper permissions can access shared reports to avoid lapses in reporting that may occur in remote or out-of-office scenarios.

In short, using the Archway Platform, the Family Office was able to eliminate manual data collection, simplify the report creation process and establish uniform data access for the Family Office staff.

Mini Case Study #4: Web-Based Access to Consolidated Financial Information

Problem: The Family Office staff was located in multiple physical locations requiring secure access to the firm’s network files. Without an online solution, important financial documents were stored in file folders and aggregated financial data was stored in spreadsheets and shared via email. The Family Office recognized the need for a more secure solution that took advantage of the modern technologies available to family offices and other private wealth management firms.

Solution: The Archway Platform’s web-based delivery model ensures that Elizabeth and Carrie can access the platform from anywhere, regardless of their physical location. Available via any web browser, the Archway Platform satisfies a need for a digital tool that can be accessed on-demand. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, this became more important than ever as the entire Family Office team transitioned to remote work environments.

Carrie, Elizabeth and the broader Family Office team are able to securely share documents and financial data via the system and, more importantly, perform their day-to-day operations in tandem with one another. Both Carrie and Elizabeth agree that the Family Office’s financial data aggregation and reporting operations were unaffected throughout the transition because of their prior implementation of the Archway Platform.

Watch a demo of the Archway Platform to find out how the technology can help you integrate your accounting, investment data aggregation and financial reporting operations to establish efficiency and flexibility in an ever-changing family office environment.

DISCLAIMER: These case studies describe the attributes of a specific Archway Group client based on objective criteria, including organizational goals, product offering and asset size. Discussion of results is intended to help clients understand Archway Group’s customized approach and capabilities and should not be regarded as representative of the experience of other clients nor indicative of future results.

How Family Offices and Financial Institutions Can Create Effective Financial Reporting for High-Net-Worth Families

As a financial caretaker for high-net-worth families and individuals, you face a lot of pressure to not only manage and preserve your clients’ wealth but also communicate and deliver on it at any given time.

With an abundance of tools and solutions available to help your team manage the workload, it’s easy to get pulled down the path of delivering too much of the wrong information that ultimately fails to engage your end-client. Avoiding this mistake is crucial.

After all, the purpose of client reporting is to translate complex investment data into clear, concise reporting that meets your clients at their level.

There’s a lot to consider to make client reporting effective, but a few of the most important questions to answer include:

• Who will be reading the reports? What level of reporting detail are they comfortable with?
• Is the reporting easy to consume? Does it meet their expectations?
• Are you including the right types of reporting? For instance, is the client interested in a monthly review of cash inflows and outflows or would they prefer to look at investment performance and exposure?
• Are you able to access all of the data you need to completely represent the client’s financial holdings? Are you able to easily slice and dice the data in a way that makes sense to the reader?
• Does the report layout help the reader visually move through the data? Do ancillary charts and graphs add value or are they a distraction?
• How will you get reporting to your end-client? Digitally? In person?

Below we’ve compiled a list of tips for reporting on high-net-worth wealth – a set of client reporting dos and don’ts – to help your family office or financial institution produce effective personal financial reporting.

The Dos and Don'ts of Client Reporting

DO: Ask family office staff and family members what financial reports they wish they had

In a world where financial reporting options are endless, how do you know what reports the client wants if you don’t ask? Invite them to share their opinion, learn their preferences and listen to their questions – at the end of the day, personal financial reports should represent the client’s complete net worth in a way that makes sense to them.

To start, meet with individual family members or households to get a better understanding of their financial knowledge and reporting expectations.

Questions you could consider asking your clients:

• How do you measure financial success?
• How do you want to categorize your holdings?
• How do you want to view investment performance? In a table or a graph?
• What level of detail do you like to see on your personal financial reports? Do you prefer to see a summary of your holdings or the underlying position detail?
• Are you interested in traditional financial statements like balance sheets, income statements and cash flow reports?

Similarly, be sure to meet with internal family office staff and advisors to define what operational reports can be produced to improve financial insight and decision-making.

DON’T: Implement a “one size fits all” reporting style

This suggestion is simple, but often overlooked – if your family office or financial institution is looking to stay competitive in a growing and evolving industry, forgo the cookie-cutter style reporting and focus on delivering reports that speak to each individual client’s needs, goals and preferences.

DO: Offer report flexibility and customization

Report customization is the obvious next step once you understand your end-clients’ reporting preferences.

That said, starting with a blank canvas can prove to be challenging. We recommend taking a controlled customization approach. For example, family office software can provide a library of accounting and investment reports, each with their own unique set of parameters. Using the parameters as guide posts, family office staff can run a single report in a variety of different ways to help them align reporting with each of their end-client’s unique expectations.

DON’T: Feel like you need to write your own reports

Although report writers allow you to create wholly unique reports, they can be cumbersome to use and often require a certain degree of technical skill. In lieu of a standalone report writer, look for a family office fintech solution that offers built-in reporting capabilities with plenty of room for customization.

By using a software solution with an integrated reporting engine, you can eliminate the need for in-house technical support and reduce the amount of time spent maintaining the reports.

DO: Seek ways to improve your family office reporting speed, efficiency and efficacy

“How can I speed up my family office reporting process?” is a question we hear regularly from family offices evaluating the reporting tools within the Archway Platform^SM.

One of the ways our family office clients accomplish this is by leveraging the automated report preparation and delivery tools within the Archway Platform. These built-in features eliminate manual data collection, report creation and delivery processes. Using these tools, family offices create a consistent, repeatable reporting process and provide a predictable reporting experience for their end-clients.

DON’T: Stick with your current family office reporting process for fear of change

We understand it can be difficult to shift away from your existing reporting processes – after all, they’re comfortable and familiar. But they can also be frustrating and, more consequently, time-consuming. If your family office has an aversion to change, consider a few “what if” scenarios.

What if I could aggregate data more efficiently and quickly? What if I could set up and schedule recurring report runs? What if I could save my report settings instead of recreating them every time I have to run a report?

Innovative technology for family offices is at your doorstep, it’s just a matter of embracing it.

DO: Implement a family office client portal

One of the biggest trends we’re seeing in family office fintech – and a key differentiator for private wealth firms – is the use of client portals. With benefits like on-demand access to personal financial reporting and availability from any location, it’s no surprise that client portals are at the top of the wish list for family offices and financial institutions.

By implementing a family office client portal, your end-clients have self-service access to their financial data via interactive dashboards and intuitive charts, graphs and tables. With clients viewing their aggregated financial information on their own schedule, you can reduce the amount of time you spend fielding questions and delivering reports.

DON’T: Assume that every family member will use modern reporting technology immediately

It’s likely that you’re producing reports for family members across several generations, each with their own level of comfort when it comes to technology. Knowing your audience – and respecting their technology preferences – is key to engaging your clients.

If you’re working with a tech-savvy family member, they’re likely already demanding digital access to their personal financial reporting. But if you’re working with a family member who is less interested in digital reporting, take your time warming them up to the technology by introducing it slowly and purposefully. It’s important to be patient and thorough in your training to help mitigate the risk of overwhelming your clients and potentially disenchanting them with the client portal altogether.

DO: Leverage automated reporting software and outsourced financial reporting services for help

In an age where everything and everyone moves at rapid speed, it’s essential that your family office moves at a similar pace.

Designed to adapt to your clients’ evolving interests and needs, family office reporting software offers purpose-built features and functionality like advanced data aggregation and reconciliation tools, user-defined classifications and groupings, integrated performance reporting and extensive report libraries.

Likewise, many firms employ teams of accounting and finance professionals that can operate the software on your behalf to ultimately deliver consolidated financial reporting to you and your end-clients.

Whether you’re looking to produce financial reporting in-house or leverage an outsourced service provider, a fintech solution designed specifically for family offices will help you deliver internal and end-client reporting with greater accuracy, speed and clarity.

DON’T: Rely on manual, time-consuming reporting processes

If your family office is still sifting through clunky spreadsheets and stacks of paper statements or manually maintaining classifications for grouping data, you could be saving time and closing the gap on human error.

Although familiar and easy to use, generic reporting solutions – including spreadsheets – are prone to error and aren’t intended to be a reporting tool for complex family offices. Adopting family office-specific reporting software can eliminate these antiquated means of reporting and provide system-wide functionality that is built for the management of complex wealth.

Ready to find out how you can take your personal financial reporting operations to the next level?

Learn how the Archway Platform can help your family office or financial institution handle complex reporting requirements and produce insightful, relevant reporting for your high-net-worth clients.

How Digital Bill Pay Tools Can Help You Remotely Manage Bill Approvals, Payments and Expense Reporting for UHNW Families

For many of us in the family office world, we’re no longer sitting in bustling offices or attending in-person boardroom meetings. We can’t request a physical signature on a check or hand our boss a packet of financial statements to review.

It goes without saying that COVID-19 has changed the way we do business and while there’s hope that many things will eventually get back to some version of normal, not everything should. As with any crisis situation, this global pandemic has exposed gaps in how businesses operate – even family offices.

As an award-winning accounting technology provider, one of the most disrupted processes we’ve learned about from our family office clients is their ability to manage the bill payment process.

The sentiment seems to be broadly shared across the family office space.

According to a recent blog published by Family Office Exchange addressing the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on family offices, family offices cited a need to improve their bill payment and document storage technology.

It’s apparent that with paper invoices still being sent to empty offices, verbal approvals still being required to pay bills and signatures still being handwritten on pre-printed check stock, there are multiple points of failure throughout the process. Pandemic aside, the inherent rigidity of manual processes can threaten operational efficiency, but it’s never been more apparent than in the absence of physical interaction.

Why You Should Already Be Using a Digital Bill Payment Tool

Digital tools – like the bill payment functionality embedded in Archway’s family office software, the Archway Platform^SM – can help family offices efficiently manage their operations regardless of physical location.

By leveraging the built-in features within our accounting technology solution, your family office can:

• Reduce the frequency of its manual bill pay processes
• Minimize required in-person contact like verbal or written approvals
• Execute quicker, more secure bill payments
• Produce accurate, timely expense and cash flow reporting

As you evaluate your technology infrastructure, it’s more important than ever to look for technology you can rely on. Technology that eases the duty of physical distance. Technology that modernizes rudimentary processes.

As for digital bill payment tools, we recommend the following considerations:

Automated Workflow

Workflow – or process management – is the series of steps that must be followed in accordance with your internal process mandates. Related to bill payment, this can include invoice review, accounts payable data entry, invoice approval, payment settlement and even expense and cash flow reporting.

Automated workflow tools enable you to implement pre-defined accounting controls that enforce separation of duties and require authorized parties to electronically provide approvals based on your family office’s unique bill pay process.

Client Portal

An interactive client portal enables family members and family office staff to participate in the AP process regardless of their geographic location.

As a result, family principals can remotely access their accounts payable information, approve bills and view expense, cash flow and other financial reporting via their mobile device – whether it be their PC, tablet or smartphone.

Digital Payment Approvals

Digitizing payment approval enables family members and family office staff to automate and execute those actions with no physical interaction.

Going beyond simple “approve” and “deny” functions, end-users of the Archway Platform can pre-approve and set dollar limits for specific vendors – like utility companies or credit card issuers – and set dollar limits to allow the payment process to continue fluidly by automating routine approvals.

Electronic Signatures

Electronic signatures, or e-sigs, are a simple image of a handwritten signature that can be applied to checks, documents or forms upon approval by a designated representative.

When it comes to the bill payment process, creating and securely storing e-signatures allow permissioned system users to apply e-sigs to checks which can be cut and printed directly from the platform. This means that family members don’t need to be physically present in order to sign checks and complete the payment cycle.

Document Management

Known by many names – document manager, document repository, document vault – this tool allows you to securely store and share digital files.

For bill payment, these files may range from vendor invoices and W-9 forms to bank statements, expense reports and other AP documents. Using the document repository, users can share, access and download relevant documents from a single, centralized location.

If you aren’t looking to invest in bill payment technology, but find the bill pay process cumbersome, consider evaluating outsourced bill pay services. At Archway, our financial administration team can assume the responsibilities of bill payment while still allowing approvals and oversight to come from your family office staff and end-clients.

Discover how your family office can leverage the Archway Platform’s accounts payable technology – whether it’s in-house, outsourced or some combination of both – in our Accounts Payable Functionality Overview.

3 Traits Family Offices and Financial Institutions Should Look for in an Innovative Fintech Firm

The ever-changing fintech industry has family offices and financial institutions facing increased pressure to deliver modernized client experiences and customer-friendly technology solutions. In order for your firm to remain competitive in such a rapidly evolving industry, it’s critical to source a technology provider that is committed to continuous product innovation.

While we’ve written a lot about finding the right fintech solution, one thing that’s worth highlighting is finding a technology solution that will adapt and extend to exceed your clients’ expectations.

As an award-winning fintech provider with decades of experience, we have an innate commitment to make sure we design and develop innovative products that evolve, improve and simplify the way our clients do their jobs. This calls for an attuned ear towards user feedback, an aggressive product roadmap and a constant pulse on industry trends. We believe that this is how all fintech providers should operate, but this isn’t always the case.

In reality, over time, some software companies slow their development cycles, limit their solution innovation and settle into a “this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude. These software companies oftentimes brandish lower costs and brand-names to attract prospective clients, but lack the forward-thinking of a truly innovative fintech firm. As a result, clients who expect state-of-the-art technology and streamlined processes instead endure a disproportionate amount of dissatisfaction.

To help you find a fintech firm that is acutely aware of the importance of product growth and innovation, we’ve identified three basic traits to look for as you evaluate potential solutions:

Strong Customer Focus

At the epicenter of every innovative company is the customer and their needs. Without customer buy-in and approval, product or service solutions will never be successful. So, naturally, it makes sense to put them as a firm’s focal point when building out new solutions.

By analyzing customer satisfaction and feedback – what do users like or not like, how can we help our clients scale their business of tomorrow, can you eliminate clicks to complete a task, what tool would help them better perform their job, how does our software help them be more efficient – innovative technology firms are more adept at building useful solutions.

As you evaluate potential solutions for your family office or financial institution, look for ways in which the provider collects client concerns, questions, requests and solution enhancements.

At Archway, we utilize customer focus groups, online enhancement request forums and face-to-face meetings between software users and our relationship managers to allow our clients to have their voices heard. Using their feedback and suggestions, we build solutions that address genuine client needs while moving our family office platform forward in tune with the broader industry’s expectations.

Malleable Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is a fundamental tool used by fintech firms large and small. It provides collective guidance on the direction of the platform and solution, it helps teams prioritize product aspirations and, as an added bonus, it can serve as a tool during the due diligence process as prospective clients ask “What will the solution look like one year, three years and five years from now?”

It sets the direction not just for the product and engineering teams but for the entire firm.

Without it, firms can easily lose focus of the platform’s ultimate goals resulting in disjointed product releases and incremental enhancements that don’t deliver widespread, notable efficiencies for users.

That said, a product roadmap doesn’t always need to be set in stone. Technology development and innovation occurs at lighting speed so a product development roadmap should not be criticized if priorities shift to meet client, prospect and industry demand. A product roadmap is an ever evolving document.

It requires continuous adjustments based on feedback from both internal and external stakeholders and it balances development of new, progressive features with the enhancement of existing, foundational functionality.

Awareness of Industry Trends

While a strong product development strategy requires a keen focus on feedback, it’s also important that your potential technology provider stays current with fintech and overarching technology trends.

To do this, many family office technology and service providers participate in the same membership-based communities and conferences as family office professionals and HNW family members.

Through these partnerships and events, firms are able to gather feedback and knowledge about emerging technologies like blockchain and machine-learning, hear first-hand what financial services firms are looking for in their technology and service solutions and gather insight into what’s on the horizon for the industry as a whole.

By interacting with members of the industry who may have different needs and wants than their existing user-base, technology teams are in a better position to diversify and build out their product functionality.

As you evaluate technology providers, ask them what conferences they attend. Do they go to industry conferences to understand the evolving needs of family offices and financial institutions that work with HNW families? Do they attend large-scale fintech conferences where they can gather ideas for future product innovations? Do they understand the entirety of the technology landscape – and how they can leverage other tools to create efficiencies in their own product suite?

Identifying technology providers that keep an open mind towards product innovation, gather and implement customer and prospect feedback and are willing to pursue new ideas will help you find a technology partner that can grow in stride with your own firm.

Archway Family Office Services is proud to be part of an organization of people determined to deliver transformative fintech solutions. Archway’s commitment to innovation stems from a culture that empowers our team to find new answers, solve complex problems, inspire each other and learn from both our successes and our failures – so that we can continue to move the market forward.

As we embrace this commitment to innovation, we are excited to share our ongoing enhancement to the Archway Platform^SM.

Originally published March 26, 2020, updated Mar 29, 2022

Questions You Should Be Asking When Creating a Technology POC

If you’ve been tasked with finding the right technology solution for your family office, you know that a lot is on the line. You know that selecting the right technology solution can improve your family office’s efficiency and catapult your credibility as a decision maker – and selecting the wrong technology solution can put you in the hot seat.

Beyond asking the right questions, it’s important to remember: it’s not enough to take the vendor’s word for what they can do for your family office – they need to prove what they can do for your family office.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through a well-crafted proof of concept (POC).

POCs allow you to take a deeper dive into the software application, which enables you to determine whether or not the platform’s capabilities can really address your biggest pain points. Furthermore, if proven successful, POCs offer tangible evidence that can be used to help you get buy-in for the investment within your family office and from the family itself.

However, as a family office fintech provider that’s been on the receiving end of thousands of technology evaluations and inquiries over the past two decades, we oftentimes hear family offices ask: what is the best way to come up with a proof of concept?

While there are lots of different ways to conduct a POC, we’ve identified four steps to help you construct a basic outline for a successful proof of concept.

Step 1: Create a proof of concept introduction

The first thing to consider when creating a proof of concept is outlining who you are as a firm and what you hope to accomplish with the POC. This may seem like a no-brainer to most – after all, we know who we are and what we need, don’t we? Truth be told, it’s one of the most overlooked components of a POC but provides your potential technology vendor with tremendous context around the complexity and logic of your processes and operations.

At this stage, it’s also important to provide detail around expectations and deliverables for the POC including goals, timeline and response format.

Step 2: Define your firm's most critical pain points

If you’re going through a family office software selection, we’re sure you already have a laundry list of challenges and inefficiencies you want to address with a new technology solution. But it’s important to narrow the scope in your POC so that the responding vendors can prioritize your biggest pain points and avoid getting bogged down with demonstrating the “nice-to-have” functionality.

At this point, you should be thinking in broad topics and we recommend limiting the scope of your POC to 5-8 pain points.

Examples of common pain points include accounts payable, partnership allocations and alternative asset tracking. As you and your team think through your operations, make sure to account for the volume, regularity and complexity of each pain point to make sure you’re including the most relevant and worthwhile set of scenarios in the POC, which we discuss in the next step.

Step 3: Describe the current and future state of operations

Once you’ve identified your generalized pain points, you can begin mapping each pain point to specific operations and tasks. The goal during this step is to describe how you currently execute these functions and what your expectations are for the future so that you can determine which specific tasks should be included in the use cases.

For instance, if the accounts payable function has been identified as a troublesome spot for your family office, begin outlining the explicit tasks that are challenging. Start by asking yourself which tasks are most difficult or cumbersome to complete: Is it check writing? Is it wire transfers? Is it tracking and reporting on expenses? Is it securely storing AP data like invoices and electronic signatures?

By letting the vendors know where your trouble spots lie, they can more effectively assert value over your current process, which ultimately helps you build buy-in towards the technology solution.

Step 4: Provide detailed use case scenarios

Using the list of tasks associated with each pain point, you can devise concrete examples and requirements for delivering on each component in the POC.

In many cases, your technology vendor may already have scenarios and sample data sets configured to prove out their capability. In other cases, the pain point may be so specific or the requirement so detailed that it makes sense to provide mocked up data for the technology vendor. If you plan to provide sample data, keep in mind whatever data you provide is what the technology vendor will replicate in their system, so make sure that it is accurate and complete before launching your POC.

Whether your family office is managing the due diligence process on its own or partnering with an experienced industry consultant, a POC gives your firm an opportunity to put technology vendors to the test as they vie to win your business. As a result, you are able to attest to the solution’s capabilities and verify that the vendor can, in fact, help alleviate your biggest pain points.

Download our mini ebook Family Office Tech Evaluation: Building a Successful Proof of Concept, which lays out four steps to help create a proof of concept and the questions you should be asking to help get you there.

How Family Offices and Financial Institutions Can Use Digital Reporting to Engage the Next Generation of High-Net-Worth Clients

The world of high-net-worth private wealth management is changing rapidly. Over the next 25 years we will see a change of the guard as $68 trillion shift from current wealth owners to heirs and charities according to the 2018 Cerulli report on high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth markets. According to the same report, by the end of the 25 years, Gen Xers will replace Baby Boomers as the wealthiest generation.

With this transition of wealth will come a new wave of expectations that will force many family offices and financial institutions to evaluate how they deliver their private wealth management solutions.

Andrew Fay, Senior Vice President of Fidelity Family Office Services, addressed the importance of finding near-term solutions that bridge the gap between current and future wealth holders.

More than ever, single-family offices and their executives must ensure they are aligned with the evolving needs of the family and staying relevant in an ever-changing world. In our opinion, offices need to consider how to stay one step ahead, accelerate their pace of change and find creative solutions to help the current family and future generations fulfill their ambitions.

– Andrew Fay, Senior Vice President, Fidelity Family Office Services

Whether these solutions tackle how you communicate with your clients or how you manage and report on their assets, family offices and financial institutions will be forced to adapt to the next generation of wealth holders.

Our focus is on the latter: reporting – specifically digital reporting – for high-net-worth clients.

Here are some best practices to help you transition your legacy reports into modern, digital reporting tools.

Get Ahead of the Curve

While the Great Wealth Transfer is certainly underway, it’s important to note that it’s not going to happen overnight. So, for most, the introduction of digital technology is two-fold.

On one hand, digital reporting needs to be available today in order to retain the next generation of wealth holders tomorrow. According to Financial Advisor magazine, between 66% and 90% of next-generation heirs leave behind their parents’ financial advisor soon after receiving their inheritance. By developing a digital strategy ahead of time, you can build relationships with the next generation and avoid finding yourself somewhere behind the eight ball.

On the other hand, you will likely still have a cohort of clients that prefer their financial reporting right where they can feel it: in their hands. Quite frankly, sometimes that’s just the way it is. But with today’s array of reporting tools for family offices and financial institutions, you can more often than not serve both contingencies – the ones that embrace technology and the ones that rebuke it – using a single platform.

For instance, the Archway Platform℠ features an integrated batching and scheduling tool that offers multiple ways to deliver client reporting including:

• Printed, hard-copy reports
• Digital reports shared via email, FTP or document manager
• Interactive dashboard-style reporting delivered via a client portal

With a variety of flexible reporting options, family offices and financial institutions can implement the right solution for each individual client.

Understand Your Client's Digital Intelligence and Build Out

If you find yourself in a position where you’re dealing with both of the aforementioned mentalities, we recommend taking stock of each client's digital intelligence to better understand their relationship with technology. For many, what comes across as an aversion to technology is really just a lack of understanding.

That said, there will always be fear in the unknown. So, start simple and build out.

Leverage Your Client’s Existing Reporting

While some clients – like Gen Xers and Millennials – will happily jump on the digital bandwagon, it’s important to give wary family members and end-clients ample time to become comfortable with the new technology.

If some of your clients seem less than enthusiastic about accessing their financial reports on a tablet, the best thing to do is to mirror their existing reporting experience. While this may seem redundant to a tech-savvy individual, you have to keep in mind that not all generations inherently understand – or trust – technology. So, when you begin to introduce the digital reporting tool, be sure to do so with a hard copy of their reports on hand.

If the client shows signs of skepticism or seems disinterested, use the paper reports to tether the data to a familiar source.

By creating a parallel between the client’s existing report package and the digital reporting available via the client portal, you reduce the risk of overwhelming your client and potentially turning them off from the digital reporting tool.

Start with the Basics

One way to do this is to grant limited access off the start. At a high level, you'll want to mimic the existing level of reporting detail to maintain consistency across the two reporting mediums.

For example, many digital reporting tools allow users to drill through summary-level data groupings to access the underlying details. Be sure to ask yourself, does the client's current reporting provide security-level or transaction-level detail? If the answer is no, make an effort to restrict the amount of detail that can be accessed inside of the client portal to avoid confusion.

When it comes to our platform, we typically recommend that family offices and financial institutions give their high-net-worth clients access to a subset of the available reporting tabs within the Archway Platform's client portal. We like to start with the Financial Overview Dashboard and the Document Manager tabs.

Financial Overview Dashboard. This screen provides clear visualizations of your client’s investment data in a comfortable, easy-to-consume format. Featuring dynamic charts, graphs and tables, this screen can be configured to show basic holdings and entity ownership or more sophisticated analytics like target-to-actual asset allocation and top performing investments.

Document Manager. This screen simply allows clients to download traditional PDF report packages that have been put together by their financial advisor or a member of their family office. In most cases, these report packages are the exact same reports that historically would have been printed, instead of provided digitally.

Since this feature represents nothing more than a new way of delivering your client’s reports and third-party documents, it’s easy to portray the client portal as a seamless extension of the existing reporting construct.

As your clients become more comfortable with the platform, you can begin granting access to other features upon request. By acknowledging that some clients may be less willing to adopt new technology, you can create a personalized transition plan to ultimately deliver a compelling reporting experience.

Become a Technology Advocate

Technology can be challenging for everyone, but that doesn’t mean learning new technology platforms should be made less of a priority. In fact, we often see that the family offices and financial institutions that fail to embrace client training largely undermine their technology investment.

If you’re well-versed in the platform and regularly position it as a solution to your clients’ problems, buy-in becomes organic. Here are a few scenarios where you can promote technology for the win through subtle client training:

On Available Cash

Client: I need to know how much cash is sitting in my accounts. We may need to liquidate some investments, I’m not sure yet. I have a meeting with a fund manager tomorrow afternoon, so I need an answer before then.

You: I can do you one better. Remember the Archway Client Portal we implemented? Let’s log into it and I’ll show you where to find that information right now.

On Reporting Customization

Client: I’m thinking about diversifying abroad through some foreign mutual funds. Where do we stand right now on our global allocation?

You: Let’s go through it in the client portal. All of your investments are tied to a security class called Region and you can toggle between the other security classes we set up like Asset Class and Sector. What percentage of assets were you thinking of allocating to foreign markets? We can create an asset allocation model so that you can compare your target to actual allocation from the portal’s dashboard as time goes on.

On Last Month’s Reports

Client: I met with my old business partner and he was asking if I’d invested in any interesting deals lately. Can you send me recent performance for all of my venture capital deals?

You: Sure. I’ll put together a report showing VC fund performance and drop it out in the portal’s Document Manager with some commentary on the investments. You’ll get a notification on your phone when it’s ready.

On Approving Bills

Client: I’m traveling to London for a few weeks and I don’t want to get behind on any of the expenses for the SoHo remodel. You’ll need my signature on the checks. What should we do?

You: Not a problem. As the invoices come in, we can set up notifications to go to you when I add new bills to the portal. Just log in on your phone, review the documents and approve them electronically. Alternatively, you can set up pre-approvals for the vendors working on the SoHo apartment so that we can auto-pay those expenses while you're out of the country.

On Data Security

Client: Why does Archway make me enter my password and a special code? This seems like a lot of work.

You: The special code is called multi-factor authentication and it’s there to protect your information. That feature is optional, so we can turn it off if you’d like but I would recommend keeping it in place to prevent your account from being compromised.

While not every issue can be solved by on-demand reporting and client portal technology, digital tools certainly lend themselves in your favor when it comes to being a reliable, timely resource for your affluent clients. As the transfer of wealth continues, make sure that your family office or financial institution is taking the necessary steps to remain relevant in the age of digital reporting.

Find out how Archway Family Office Services can help redefine the way your next generation of end-clients access and analyze their financial information using the Archway Platform's mobile client portal.

How Family Offices Can Get the Most Out of Their Technology Solution

You know how to prepare your family office for a technology implementation project, but do you know what comes after your organization is up and running on the new system?

For many family offices, successfully implementing a financial technology solution is a welcome boost to their operational efficiency.

Saddled with modern, integrated tools and automated processes, family office teams can be more productive and more accurate. But while financial technology is an incredible tool, it’s only as good as your ongoing commitment to maintain the solution.

In other words, it’s simply not enough to implement a fintech platform for your family office.

To help you get the most out of your technology platform, we’ve come up with three tips to help you maximize your financial technology investment.

Embrace Change

To some degree, implementing a new technology solution means having to relearn how to do your job on a new system. And while no one likes a drastic learning curve, the benefits of modern family office technology generally outweigh the inconvenience of learning how to use the new tools.

Case in point, when it comes to reporting, family office financial technology can benefit both your internal accounting and investment teams as well as your end-clients. That said, we acknowledge that nearly every family office has its own version of reporting and it can be easy to get hung up on legacy reports. But when you’re transitioning to a new reporting tool, particularly if the old reporting tool was Excel, formatting and layouts are bound to change.

To soften this transition, we encourage our clients to take a step back and consider the data: do the new reports tell the same story as the old reports?

Most of the time, the answer is yes. But we also acknowledge how difficult it can be to abandon that old workbook in Excel. Now this is where the embrace change part comes in. New technology offers you a blank canvas and while you can spend your time repainting the same picture, you can also put that time-consuming, medley of Excel-based charts and graphs to rest and introduce a new package of clear, concise reports.

To help ease the shift from old to new, we recommend making time to sit down with both your internal staff and the family members you work with to discuss the benefits of the new reporting tool, address any concerns and introduce the new reporting. By establishing value early on, you can expect greater buy-in and a quicker adoption of the new technology.

Never Stop Learning

As a part of our implementation process, we like to ask our new clients to create a list of roles and responsibilities.

Who will be using the system? What functions do they need to perform inside of the platform? What types of reports do they need to generate?

This information helps us train our clients on the functionality that is pertinent to their role. But one of the most common mistakes we see in the technology space is abandonment. Once the technology solution is implemented and the users know how to perform their job functions inside of the system, they settle into their routines and they plateau.

We tend to see this manifest in two ways: failure to stay up-to-date on the system’s capabilities and reluctance to address small issues that require manual fixes or workarounds.

Let’s start with the workarounds. An example might be a bank fee that comes in automatically every month that gets posted to the wrong account. Instead of manually fixing the entry each month, most technology providers would rather you reach out to the support team to help you fix the issue once and for all.

Put it this way, if you spend two minutes per day manually correcting the issue this means that over the course of the year you’re spending an entire workday using a workaround.

2 minutes per day = 10 minutes per week

10 minutes per week x 52 weeks = 520 minutes

520 minutes / 60 minutes per hour = ~8.5 hours per year spent on a workaround

Whether you spend an hour reverting the books to fix a bad entry or dedicate an hour to learning a new tool that allows you to achieve the same result more quickly, you ultimately save yourself 7.5 hours that can be put towards a better use of your time.

That said, you may never know new tools exist if you don’t stay informed.

Ongoing product education is key to maximizing your technology investment, but it’s on you and your teammates to take full advantage of the education opportunities your technology provider offers. Read release notes and product documentation, attend user conferences and networking events and, by all means, ask for training when it’s needed. These educational resources are designed to help you succeed, which at the end of the day is the number one priority of any fintech firm worth its salt.

Leverage Supplemental Tools

It’s the job of a salesperson to sell you a solution that goes beyond satisfying your basic requirements, so when you first begin implementing a new fintech platform, it can be easy to get ahead of yourself. It’s only natural to want to test drive your shiny new toy, but it’s incredibly important to establish a solid foundation before you begin tinkering with the bells and whistles.

Start simple with the core tools. Using the Archway Platform℠ as an example, this includes defining your chart of accounts, learning how to use the investment and bank account information delivered via automated data feeds and establishing your reporting output. This may also include more specific types of functions like cutting checks or tracking intercompany loans, depending on the scope of your initial requirements.

Once you’ve become comfortable with the essential tools of the system, you can consider some of the nice-to-have features that you were originally sold on. Examples of supplemental tools to consider include:

• Asset modeling tools that define investment allocation models and allow you to produce target-to-actual reporting
• Automated fee billing capabilities that automatically calculate and bill client fees based on a variety of asset-based fee calculation methods
• Budgeting tools that allow you to create multiple budgets that can be used for budget-to-actual comparison
• Client portal technology that provides an interactive, mobile reporting dashboard for family members and end-clients
• Reconciliation screens that enable you to compare position-level and account-level activity within the system against an external data source to ensure data accuracy
• Report batching and scheduling functionality that allows you to save report configurations and establish recurring report schedules

In addition to supplemental tools, some technology firms also offer ad hoc services that can be leveraged to help your team be more efficient. If you find that your organization is spending an inordinate amount of time reconciling data, paying bills or processing partnership allocations, it may be worth considering whether business process outsourcing could be a good fit for your team.

In our case, Archway Family Office Services offers a variety of outsourced services that our clients can use on a standalone basis or in conjunction with their in-house operations teams.

What’s Next?

Regardless of what technology solution you choose to implement, remembering these tips can help you and your team get the most out of your new fintech platform and ensure that your investment doesn’t go to waste.

Haven’t made a decision yet?

Get in front of your technology investment by understanding the full suite of technology and service solutions offered by Archway Family Office Services.

How Family Offices and Financial Institutions Can Leverage Reporting Technology

The ultra-wealthy market segment continues to increase year-over-year in both population and net worth. According to an analysis by Wealth-X, the ultra-wealthy population rose by 12.9% alongside a combined net asset growth of 16.7% in 2017 alone. As family offices and financial institutions begin supporting more family members with more money, it becomes increasingly clear that antiquated means of reporting – like spreadsheets and manual processes – cannot keep pace.

So how do firms move forward to meet their end-clients sophisticated reporting expectations?

They leverage financial reporting technology.

Breaking the Addiction to Spreadsheets

Client reporting is challenging enough without having to rely upon clunky, makeshift tools for tracking and reporting on your client’s financial position. We understand why your firm may not be jumping up and down at the thought of replacing your existing processes and spreadsheets in lieu of high-tech reporting. If you’re like many family offices, you’ve been using the same processes and spreadsheets for years, so it’s only natural to be content with the status quo.

Nevertheless, it’s important to consider the limitations that innately come with spreadsheets. Although easy to use and universally understood, spreadsheets are not intended to be the baseline reporting tool for complex family offices. Here’s why:

Reason #1 – Lack of Accessibility

An application like Excel isn’t designed to support live collaboration. In a family office, it’s quite possible that while you are entering data and running reports in one entity, a colleague may be doing the exact same thing in a different entity.

If that data sits in the same spreadsheet, whose entries get saved? Or, unfortunately, whose entries get saved over? With numerous individuals working on multiple variations of a spreadsheet, it’s nearly impossible to say which version is correct and most up-to-date – which is a recipe for reporting incorrect information.

Reason #2 – Lack of Scalability

Excel is highly customizable, but it’s not scalable across larger volumes of more complex data. And while you may be tempted to create complicated macros and formulas, the reality is that few peers exist in your organization capable of supporting these more complex mechanisms should they break.

Put simply, spreadsheets are not designed to be used in scenarios involving intricate ownership structures, various investment types, multiple currencies and sophisticated reporting requirements – all of which are trademarks of a modern family office.

Reason #3 – Lack of Security

Excel lacks the security and sophistication of purpose-built reporting databases maintained inside of world-class hosting facilities. When it comes to family office security, this goes far beyond password protecting your spreadsheets and locking your computer when you leave the office for the day.

If server backups, data encryption and vulnerability assessments aren’t a part of your security playbook, you’re not doing enough to protect the family’s personal and financial data, and you’re leaving your spreadsheets open to security breaches.

Adopting Family Office Reporting Software

When considering a financial reporting software, it’s important to define expectations across the back-office accounting and investment teams as well as the family members and their advisors.

Before you invest in a reporting software solution, it’s best to figure out what type of reporting you want to produce. We suggest starting with an evaluation of both your investment strategy as well as your current reporting process. A few key factors to consider:

• Asset Types. What types of assets are you reporting on? Should the software be able to handle both public equities and alternative investments? What about personal assets like homes, artwork and jewelry?
• Advanced Accounting. Are you able to track book and tax basis? Do you have a means of capturing and reporting on complex transactions such as mergers, spinoffs and splits? Do you need visibility into underlying tax lots? Do you use complicated inventory relief methods?
• Data. Where is your data coming from? Can the reporting engine receive data electronically from multiple custodians and managers? How is alternative investment data received?
• Performance Calculations. Do you need to be able to run time-weighted and money-weighted returns? If not now, what about in the future?
• Benchmarks. Do you currently rely on benchmarks to gauge investment performance? Does the software allow you to create custom benchmarks or are you limited to industry-standard indices?
• Report Generation. Can you automate report creation? Can you combine multiple reports into a single document? Will you be able to create a table of contents?
• Report Delivery. How do you plan to deliver the reports? Are you interested in email or client portal functionality?
• Customization. Do you need the ability to build ad hoc reports? Do you use user-defined investment grouping or categorizations? Do you need to control the branding of the reports?

Citing James Day, Managing Director of Peritus Investment Consultancy, WealthBriefing’s white paper on must-have reporting capabilities for modern wealth managers addresses the need for sophisticated reporting that goes beyond market values to incorporate metrics like asset allocation, fixed income characteristics and performance calculations.

But, more importantly, the article states that while all of these features lend themselves to better reporting, the core purpose of client reporting is to increase client engagement – which means providing end-clients with the information they want to see in a format that is easy for them to understand.

Finding the Right Tools for the Job

Investing in a reporting software that offers a wide variety of features and functionality will give you a greater degree of flexibility to adapt to your clients’ evolving interests and needs – with the end-goal being increased client engagement. We know that reporting requirements can vary greatly between clients, so to help you set the foundation we’ve outlined several reporting software features that frequently come up among prospective family office clients.

Standard Report Library

Oftentimes, a family office’s first instinct is to seek out a reporting solution that allows for absolute customization. However, they quickly find that starting with a blank canvas can be overwhelming, which can undermine the flexibility of the solution. To help clients become comfortable with the software, many technology providers offer a report library that contains a suite of standard reports such as traditional financial statements, asset allocation, investment activity, performance and risk reports.

With on-demand access to the report library, family offices and financial institutions can quickly analyze data to help them answer their client’s financial questions without having to create complex reports on the fly.

Having said that, it’s been our experience working with hundreds of family offices that no two clients are the same. We’ve taken that notion and built upon the report library concept, allowing clients to select from a list of parameters on each report – we call this controlled customization. With the ability to toggle between investment classifications, types of inputs, performance calculations and report layouts, family offices and financial institutions can easily configure reporting to meet the varying expectations of their end-clients.

Flexible Performance Reports

Not all reporting software is created equal and the topic of performance can further complicate the reporting landscape.

At the most basic level, you’ll find providers that focus on delivering the bare minimum – the kind of reporting that only displays transaction data and rarely aggregates positions across managers or custodians. These providers often lack the ability to provide detailed data at the position-level and are limited to simple investment types, like equities and mutual funds. Among these providers, performance may or may not calculated.

At the next level, you’ll find providers that offer data aggregation across multiple custodians, but provide limited investment analysis information and oftentimes lack an ability to properly track more sophisticated investments like hedge funds, private equity, derivatives and options.

At the most sophisticated level, reporting software providers have built functionality that allows users to measure performance across both public and private investments. These providers offer performance reporting that takes into account things like the timing of activity, cash flows, income, gain/loss, accrued income, pending trades and terminal values.

For many family offices, these providers are the only viable option given the ever-changing investment diversification strategies employed by the HNW population.

Automated Reporting

The ability to aggregate data into meaningful reports is the primary consideration when selecting a reporting software provider. But finding a provider with ease-of-use features in their platform comes in as a close second.

When evaluating reporting software providers, it’s important to consider whether or not the technology will make your job easier. With reporting software, you’ll certainly have more data at your fingertips, but if you can’t produce or deliver the reporting content efficiently, it will hardly add value.

Having the ability to combine multiple reports into a single document allows you to produce a customizable, comprehensive report package – your client’s complete financial picture. Combined with report scheduling and automation tools, you not only create an automated, repeatable internal reporting process but you also provide your end-clients with a predictable and familiar reporting experience.

Flexible Reporting Output and Delivery Methods

Before you select a reporting technology, we encourage you to sit down with your end-clients to understand their report delivery expectations. It’s important to recognize that reporting expectations may vary between generations. For instance, G1 may prefer in-person meetings with hard-copy reports and real-time discussion, whereas G2 and G3 may opt to access their reports on their mobile device while traveling abroad.

As you evaluate the technology’s features and functionality, make a point to ask about output options and delivery methods. Can you save reports to an external FTP server? Can you email reports directly from the application? Does the software provider offer document storage or client portal tools? Can the technology include interactive dashboard-style reporting?

As technology continues to evolve, so will your client’s preferences and expectations around the way they consume their financial information. By selecting a reporting software that can adeptly handle these requests, you will be better poised to successfully engage your client and maintain their trust.

Find out how Archway Family Office Services addresses complex reporting requirements for hundreds of family offices and financial institutions.

10 Types of Reports Every Family Office and Financial Institution Should Have in Their Toolkit

It’s no secret that providing the right financial reporting to your clients can be a time-consuming and demanding task for family offices and financial institutions. Not only are you reporting on complex investments and intricate ownership structures, but you’re dealing with multiple individuals that each have a unique set of preferences and expectations. Simply put, what works for one family member may not work for another.

At the end of the day – or week or month or quarter – producing a set of reports that captures the right information and, more importantly, can be easily digested by the end-client is critical to establishing transparency and building client trust.

Why Personalized Financial Reporting Matters

As technology continues to evolve and play a larger role in family offices and financial institutions, expectations to go beyond the “one size fits all” approach are heightened. Based on Wendy Spires' commentary from a Family Wealth Report article on high net worth client reporting, you lose your competitive edge if operating under a traditional financial reporting style.

Furthering this notion, Spires implies that adopting a personalized reporting construct for each unique client lends itself not only to higher client satisfaction and stronger relationships but also to better decision making.

As you begin evaluating personalized report packages for your clients, we encourage you to think about the story that you want to tell. Identify your audience and their expectations. Ask yourself:

• Who will be reading this report?
• What information is relevant to them?
• Will they get more out of a single page financial dashboard? Or do they prefer granular detail?
• Are they making decisions or just checking in?
• Will these reports enrich your client's understanding of their financial position? Or will they create confusion?

According to Spires, many firms consider progress in reporting systems as a means of pumping more information at family members rather than delivering the right information. But when this approach is applied universally across all clients, it can result in client disengagement. As she puts it, the better approach to client reporting is to provide your clients with visually compelling and useful information that aligns with their goals and ultimately helps them make better decisions.

Aligning Reporting with Client Goals

Finding the right set of reports for each client can be challenging. We recommend sitting down with each client to get a better understanding of their financial comprehension, their presentation preferences and their short-term and long-term goals. It’s equally important to acknowledge generational divides and how they can affect your clients’ reporting preferences.

For example, some clients may prefer hard-copy paper statements, while younger generations tend to have an affinity for mobile, on-demand reporting.

As your client’s advisor and financial caretaker, your responsibility is to provide a clear and honest financial narrative that helps them reach their goals and become a more active participant in their financial story.

To help you compose the right report package that speaks to your client’s financial goals and unique interests, we’ve identified 10 types of reports that every family office and financial advisor should have in their toolkit.

Financial Statements

Traditional financial statements like the balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows are certainly not for every wealthy investor. For some, these reports are lackluster and void of interesting information. But for the astute investor or former business owner, these financial position documents are a cornerstone piece of understanding the sustainability of their wealth. They provide a clear picture of what they own and what they owe along with current and future profitability.

Seems important, right?

Knowing that these inquiries may surface, family offices and financial institutions should always be prepared to address questions around the financial health of any given individual, household or legal entity – and financial statements provide the answers they need.

Net Worth

Family offices and financial institutions are acutely aware of the fact that high net worth individuals and families pose a distinct challenge when it comes to net worth reporting. Not only do they have multiple banking and custodial accounts, but they’re oftentimes involved in various investment partnerships, private equity and hedge fund deals, real estate properties and direct business ventures.

That’s still not taking into account their personal assets like homes, vehicles, aircraft, artwork and jewelry.

There’s no arguing that there are a lot of moving pieces, but that won’t stop clients from asking how much they’re worth at any point in time. In turn, the burden rests on you to leverage technology and outside resources to put together a snapshot that accurately portrays your client’s overall financial position – regardless of where those assets reside.

Asset Allocation / Exposure

Based on the 2018 Global Family Office Report prepared by Campden Wealth in partnership with UBS, family offices are continuing to iterate their investment strategies on an annual basis as they seek to balance wealth preservation with growth. As strategies change and allocations to specific asset classes, regions or managers fluctuate, it’s important to be able to track and report on these changing allocations at any point in time.

It goes without saying that you should be able to put together a variety of allocation and exposure reports that give your client a window into how their investments are performing against their investment strategy and its benchmarks. Being able to produce reporting that shows actual allocation against target allocation models, asset allocation history and investment exposure across various legal entities can go a long way in gaining your client’s trust and proving your worth as an advisor.

Activity and Holdings

How many shares of GE do I own across all of my investment accounts? What is the cost basis versus market value of my investments? How much cash flow are my investments expected to generate?

If you’ve ever had to answer questions like these, you already know how important activity and holdings reports are. Consolidating holdings across multiple custodians and managers can be difficult for high net worth investors and their advisors, but with the right reporting tools, you can do just that.

Not sure where to start? Consider evaluating a technology solution or outsourced service provider that uses direct data feeds to banks and custodians to help you collect, standardize and manage your client’s financial data.

Performance and Attribution

Performance and attribution are key metrics used by high net worth investors to gauge the success of their individual investments and managers. Research conducted in 2018 shows that family offices prefer to outsource the management of their equity, fixed income and hedge fund investments, while managing their private equity portfolio in-house.

This can add up to quite a few external players, which means taking on the arduous process of collecting performance details from several different sources and, in some cases, aggregating the data by hand. But performance is tricky and requires a degree of expertise that can’t necessarily be found in spreadsheets.

Instead, we suggest taking a holistic approach to performance analysis that focuses on consolidating your information across asset classes, managers, custodians and geographies and presenting that information in a single view. By leveraging sophisticated tools like performance reporting software, APIs and automated data feeds, family offices and financial advisors can create reports that represent the broader financial picture – not just the small slice of pie that is managed internally.

Risk Analytics

Gaining position-level transparency can be a difficult problem for family offices and financial advisors to solve, especially when it comes to separately managed accounts or alternative investments. But with more and more family offices seeking greater transparency into the risks associated with their overall investment strategy, it’s important for you to harness the power of consolidation.

By establishing a single database of investment information for your high net worth client, you can easily analyze the data across multiple dimensions – like asset class, manager and liquidity – to understand the underlying risks.

Additionally, with more technology firms providing visibility across widely-accepted risk metrics like Standard Deviation, Sharpe Ratio, Drawdown, Beta, Alpha, R-Squared, Correlation and Up/Down Capture, high net worth individuals and families are gaining greater access to institutional-quality reporting metrics.

Alternative Assets

Over the past decade, alternative assets have become a staple within the investment portfolios of wealthy families. Yet many advisors struggle to capture this piece of their client’s overall investment portfolio, and rightly so. With innately unique performance and activity attributes, alternative assets can be challenging to incorporate into traditional financial reporting.

With such unique qualities, many advisors turn to workarounds like spreadsheets and over-simplified single-line valuations on statements. But the truth is that this information doesn’t provide enough detail to really help clients understand their hedge fund and private equity investments. However, with the right tools in place, advisors can comprehensively track cash flow activity, fair market value, basis, performance, investment liquidity and fee structures.

The result? A well-rounded assessment of your client’s alternative assets and their role in the overall investment portfolio.

Fixed Income Analytics

Bonds and other debt instruments continue to be a significant player among many family offices’ investment strategies, on average making up nearly 16% of the family office portfolio. This means that the ability to deliver a snapshot of fixed income characteristics, accrued interest, cash projections and credit ratings is crucial to managing this important asset category.

Putting a system in place to capture details like par, market value, yield, duration and convexity – and, better yet, automatically calculate interest and amortization – can be an effective way to deliver clear insights into your client’s fixed income investments.

Budgeting and Forecasting

Wealthy or not, it’s important to know how much money we have – and will have – and how it’s being spent. But those can be difficult questions to answer when you’re working with high net worth individuals and families. From aggregating information across multiple checking and savings accounts to keeping tabs on investment liquidity and impending cash flows, family offices and financial institutions are responsible for meeting their clients’ high – and varying – expectations.

Whether your client needs to pay an unexpected medical bill, purchase a new home or procure cash for a new investment, preparing budget to actual comparisons and cash flow forecasts can help you quickly and accurately assist your clients when planning for small and large expenses alike, while keeping their sights on their long-term financial goals.

Expense Summary

Even for the average individual, it can be easy to lose track of how much cash you’re spending. For the ultra-wealthy, spending activities only increase in complexity from simple utility and credit card bills to household expenses for multiple properties, investment capital calls and even tax payments. Between the lengthy list of vendors and the endless transactions, family offices and financial institutions struggle to track, categorize and manage their clients’ spending behaviors.

Reports that offer insight into how much your clients spend, how those expenses are allocated and who is getting paid are all key to getting your arms around your client’s spending habits. Prudent expense reporting can also help ensure that both you and your client remain compliant with the family’s wealth preservation mission.

If you're interested in learning how to tailor investment reports using each client's unique financial knowledge and investment goals, download our Optimize the Creation of Performance Reporting white paper.

A List of Technology Questions to Help You Make the Right Fintech Decision for Your Family Office

When it comes to family office technology, there is no shortage of options across the space. From integrated accounting software to portfolio management tools and investment reporting applications, there are plenty of suitable choices.

But how do you know which technology is right for your family office?

As time-consuming as it can be, the due diligence process is an important step to ensure you make the best possible technology decision. Before you make a decision, you should be able to answer questions such as:

• Can the technology be used by multiple teams or will you need more than one platform?
• Does your fintech vendor have enough experience working with complex wealthy families?
• Can your vendor handle your implementation project?
• Does your vendor provide sufficient application support and data security?

By asking a variety of questions – from the company’s background and organizational stability to the product’s functionality and reporting capabilities – you should be able to create a holistic view of how the technology solution can help your family office address its biggest pain points.

And we get it — that can be a lot to take on.

It’s no easy task to uproot your current process in search of a new technology solution. But with the right due diligence process in place – and with a little help from a ready-to-use list of technology questions – you can set your firm on a path to find the right fintech platform for your family office or financial institution.

Our compilation of role-based due diligence guides highlight key considerations that can help you choose the right fintech solution for your family office or financial institution.

Whether you’re an executive, accountant, investment advisor or IT professional, our goal is to provide you with the tools you need to make an informed technology decision for your firm.

50 Questions for Executives

Your role as an executive gives you a unique vantage point when selecting a technology platform. After all, you’re responsible for finding a technology solution that is a good fit for all players involved – tax advisors, investment operations, the accounting staff and family members alike. It’s your job to dig into the fintech vendor and become an expert in their background, the broad set of capabilities within their offering and their experience implementing technology across projects similar to yours.

50 Questions for Accountants

Given the nature of your role, you need to know the ins and outs of the system – from how it processes basic transactions to how it handles the most complex accounting scenarios. The questions in this guide focus on the features and functionality of the system, including general ledger capabilities, accounts payable tools, investment data processing and partnership accounting features.

25 Questions for Investment Advisors

As an investment advisor, you are responsible for managing and growing the family’s wealth. Finding a technology solution that allows you to plan, track and report on the family’s investments – regardless of the type of investment, where it’s held or who manages it – is your number one priority. At the end of the day, you need to know how well the technology solution can handle your unique mix of investments.

Our collection of questions regarding portfolio management, third-party data collection, performance and client reporting offers you a baseline to build out a broader set of questions that can help you find a technology solution that meets your specific requirements.

25 Questions for IT Professionals

You may not be a user of the technology, but it’s your job to verify the strength and durability of the platform. In an age where cyber security is a top concern, understanding the technology vendor’s security protocols, software development practices and hosting options will help you determine the reliability and sophistication of the system – and whether or not it is worthy of your organization’s trust.

How to Prepare Your Family Office for a Technology Implementation Project

If you’ve ever participated in a technology selection for a family office, you likely know that the process requires a great deal of attention and effort. After all, the decision made by you and your team will have effects across the board – on your in-house accounting and tax professionals, on your investment and reporting teams and even on the family members themselves.

So what can you do to help your team successfully implement your chosen technology solution and, in turn, create efficiencies for the entire team?

To be honest, that’s a loaded question. A lot goes into planning and executing a technology implementation.

Fundamentally, you will need (1) a strong project leader, (2) a practical timeline and (3) a defined budget. From there, you need to pick (4) the right tools and (5) the right people, make sure you’ve (6) assigned project tasks to the appropriate team members and (7) prepared for major decisions that will chart the course of your implementation project.

Of course it’s more complex than that, but by addressing these seven key decisions upfront, you can help ease the transition to a new technology solution for your family office.

To help illustrate these decisions, we created a simple infographic comparing technology implementations to scaling a mountain.

While we acknowledge that it may be an interesting comparison, the infographic helps define the challenges that lay ahead as you begin investigating new technology.

Download the complete white paper to understand these decisions and the underlying components that can affect how you make them.

The Hidden Costs of Spreadsheet-Driven Family Office Operations

Most family offices do not wake up one morning and decide to build a spreadsheet-driven operating model.

It happens gradually.

A spreadsheet created to solve one reporting challenge becomes two, then ten. Over time, critical financial information becomes dispersed across workbooks, shared drives, email attachments, and manual processes. What began as a practical solution transformed into operational dependency.

For many organizations, that dependency develops quietly. Reporting continues to be delivered. Financial statements are produced. Capital activity is tracked. Ownership schedules are maintained. The process may not appear broken, but the effort required to sustain it increases with every new entity, investment, account, and stakeholder added to the environment.

The issue is not Excel itself. Spreadsheets remain one of the most valuable tools available to finance professionals. The challenge emerges when spreadsheets evolve from analytical tools into systems of record that support critical family office accounting, reporting, and operational processes.

As family offices grow more complex, the hidden costs of spreadsheet-driven operations become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Why Spreadsheet Dependency Persists

For many family offices, spreadsheets offer speed, flexibility, and familiarity—enabling quick reporting and custom analysis without relying on technology resources. That flexibility is valuable, but it also drives deep reliance on spreadsheets in daily operations.

Over time, they become the default solution for increasingly complex needs: investment data in one workbook, ownership in another, capital accounts elsewhere, and reporting assembled manually. Individually manageable, these processes collectively create an operating environment that is difficult to scale, govern, and sustain.

Where the Real Effort Is Hidden

When finance and operations teams evaluate their reporting processes, they typically focus on whether reports are ultimately delivered accurately and on time. While those outcomes matter, they do not always reveal the amount of effort required to achieve them.

Many family offices spend significant time collecting information from custodians, investment managers, banks, accounting systems, fund administrators, and third-party providers before reporting can even begin. Data must be validated, reconciled, reformatted, consolidated, and reviewed. Adjustments are made manually, and supporting schedules are frequently maintained outside core systems.

This work is often treated as a normal part of the reporting cycle because it has existed for years. But the true cost is the cumulative burden created by hundreds of manual activities across every close, every reporting cycle, every capital activity update, and every year-end process.

When Complexity Outgrows the Spreadsheet

Family office environments present operational challenges that differ significantly from those of mature businesses with enterprise-scale finance organizations.

Many organizations manage multiple legal entities, trusts, partnerships, foundations, operating companies, investment vehicles, and family ownership structures simultaneously. Reporting requires information to be consolidated across operating entities, investment entities, trusts, partnerships, and beneficiaries. Capital account reporting, partnership allocations, intercompany activity, trust distributions, and investment reporting all introduce layers of complexity that are difficult to manage when information resides across disconnected spreadsheets.

As complexity grows, spreadsheets become increasingly difficult to maintain. A change to an ownership structure may require updates across multiple workbooks. A new investment may introduce additional reporting requirements. Partnership allocations must be calculated, validated, and reflected consistently across capital accounts. Intercompany transactions must be reconciled. Custodian data must be normalized before it can be used in consolidated reporting for family offices.

Even straightforward reporting requests will require substantial manual effort when accounting data, investment data, ownership records, and supporting schedules are maintained across different files and systems.

Several warning signs often emerge.

• Reporting Cycles Become Longer

Finance teams spend more time gathering and validating information before analysis and reporting can begin. Month-end, quarter-end, and year-end processes become increasingly dependent on manual coordination, especially when reporting packages require data from multiple custodians, investment managers, entities, and accounting schedules.

• Reconciliations Become More Difficult

Multiple versions of the same information begin to exist across different files and teams. Custodian data may not match accounting records. Investment manager statements may need to be reconciled against internal books. LP capital account balances may require manual validation before year-end reporting or K-1 production can move forward.

• Knowledge Becomes Concentrated

Critical reporting processes become dependent on a small number of individuals who understand how spreadsheets were built, linked, and maintained. If a controller, accountant, or operations lead leaves, the family office may lose the institutional knowledge behind how key reporting, allocation, and reconciliation processes actually work.

• Visibility Declines

As information becomes fragmented across systems and files, it becomes more difficult to obtain a complete view of financial activity across the organization. Leadership may struggle to quickly understand liquidity positions, entity-level exposures, ownership relationships, and overall portfolio performance without waiting for manual consolidation.

• Growth Creates Additional Strain

What worked effectively for ten entities may not work for fifty. What worked for a handful of investments may not work for hundreds. As entities, accounts, partnerships, and reporting stakeholders increase, the effort required to sustain spreadsheet-driven processes often grows faster than the team supporting them.

These challenges create operational and investment risk. They also affect confidence.  

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Family offices have the volume, complexity, and pace of information more akin to large and mature business yet maintain lean staffing more like a small business.

Many entities have significant or complex accounting and accounts payable needs. Investment portfolios are more diversified. Reporting expectations continue to rise. Stakeholders expect faster access to information and greater transparency across assets, entities, and ownership structures. At the same time, many family offices are being asked to do more with lean teams and finite resources.

Many organizations are also exploring automation, advanced reporting capabilities, and artificial intelligence to improve efficiency and decision-making. These initiatives have real potential, but they depend on one common prerequisite: reliable data.

Organizations cannot automate inconsistent processes. They cannot generate meaningful insights from fragmented information. They cannot fully benefit from AI if the underlying data lack’s structure, consistency, and governance.

Technology can accelerate existing processes, but it cannot compensate for poor data quality.

Excel Still Has an Important Role

None of this suggests that family offices should eliminate spreadsheets.

Excel remains one of the most effective tools available for financial analysis, forecasting, budgeting, modeling, and scenario planning. It provides flexibility that many systems cannot replicate.

The objective is not to remove spreadsheets from the finance function. The objective is to ensure that spreadsheets support analysis rather than serve as the primary repository for critical operational and financial information.

Organizations that establish this distinction are often better positioned to improve family office reporting, strengthen controls, reduce operational risk, and support future growth.

How Archway Can Help

Archway helps family offices bring accounting, investment data, and reporting together within a single platform.

With support for multi-entity accounting, complex ownership structures, capital account accounting, consolidated reporting, and family office-specific workflows, Archway helps reduce manual effort while improving visibility, consistency, auditability, and control.

That matters in the areas where spreadsheet dependency creates the most strain: ownership allocations, entity-level reporting, intercompany reconciliation, capital account tracking, and the ability to trace numbers back to the source.

For organizations seeking additional support, Archway’s Family Office Accounting services can help with bookkeeping, accounting, investment reporting, and related operational workflows.

The result is a stronger foundation for reporting, governance, scalability, and long-term growth.

Looking Ahead

Spreadsheet dependency is often a symptom of growth. As family offices become more sophisticated, the operating practices that once supported the organization may become increasingly difficult to sustain.

The next step is not simply replacing spreadsheets. It is creating a stronger foundation for financial data, reporting, governance, and decision-making.

In the next article, we explore what that foundation looks like and why it has become increasingly important as family offices prepare for a future shaped by automation, advanced reporting, and artificial intelligence.