Thanks to changes in the economy and the face of wealth management, family office will never look the same.

For one thing, the era of single family offices is essentially over, with a few exceptions, said Lisette Cooper, chief investment officer at Athena Capital Advisors, during the 2017 Invest in Women conference in Dallas on Wednesday.

Such offices, built to manage the wealth of a single wealthy family, have been done in by the growing complexity of issues facing ultra-high-net-worth clients and the demand for differentiated wealth management services.

“I came from the institutional side of the business, working with very wealthy families, and still most of them could not afford a single family office,” said Cooper. “Around the late 1990s and the early 2000s, we witnessed the rise of the multifamily office as the modern version of the family office.”

Speaking at a panel discussion titled “The Modern Family Office,” Cooper explained that for a single-family office to provide access to the diverse universe of asset classes that the ultra-wealthy demand today, the family office would need to manage at least $1 billion—an AUM leve few are able to achieve.

A modern family office, to be successful, must be able to prospect for the ultra-wealthy, even the newly wealthy, explained Whitney Kenter, partner and managing member at Matter Family Office.

“We’re getting a lot of first generation wealth creators,” said Kenter. “It’s difficult for people to manage the psychological change when they’re spinning off a company that they created and converting that into a pile of cash. It turns out they have less fear around the company risk than they do around market risk and managing the volatility that they can now see on a daily basis on their phone.”

Cooper said that Athena becomes involved in similar situations, especially with liquidity events and divorces, where an individual suddenly has to manage a new source of cash or investments.

Creating a sustainable family office, however, requires cultivating generational wealth and working with the children of current clients, said Kenter.

“We have to get to know these individuals and detach them from the family’s wealth,” said Kenter. “A lot of times, we have to help them find ways to individuate their identity from the family.”

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