How rising institutional complexity is reshaping family office operations

Family offices are undergoing a significant shift as their investment scope, structures, and expectations continue to expand. In 2025, global SFO assets totaled $4.67T, with private equity and direct deals leading the way, as outlined in the 2025 Single Family Office Asset Pools report from With Intelligence. No longer focused solely on legacy wealth preservation, family offices are increasingly operating with the scale and complexity of institutional investors across asset classes, geographies, and generations.

As this evolution accelerates, so too do expectations: greater transparency, stronger governance, and faster responses to emerging risks and opportunities. Yet, the internal tech infrastructure supporting research and decision-making often remains outdated and misaligned with these new demands.

Campden Wealth’s The Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025 finds that nearly 50% of the 146 global family office respondents expanded their service offerings over the past two years—adding capabilities such as succession planning, risk management, and private equity due diligence.

This broadening mandate raises a critical question: how are family offices managing the growing volume and complexity of investment-related information? For many, the answer lies in rethinking how investment research is organized, shared, and preserved.

Informal systems, formal expectations

Investment teams within family offices are typically lean, nimble, and aligned with the family’s long-term vision. In practice, however, many continue to depend on outdated tools like email, spreadsheets, and unstructured notes to manage critical research. As family offices grow, these informal systems can become liabilities, resulting in fragmented insights and inefficient workflows.

Meanwhile, scrutiny from stakeholders, from family members to regulators, is increasing. It’s no longer enough to explain what decisions were made; family offices are now expected to show how and why decisions were reached.

As NEPC notes in their 2025 report, Family Office Trends: New Faces & Higher Expectations, “Family offices are coming to the conclusion that they must enhance operations with institutional-level governance, risk management, and outsourcing practices.”

Governance expectations have shifted from optional best practices to baseline requirements, demanding not just transparency, but traceability and strategic alignment across the investment process.

A system-of-record for a new generation

This is where a modern Research Management System (RMS) can play a transformative role. An RMS is more than a document repository; it becomes a true system-of-record that preserves a firm’s collective intelligence. It’s a central, searchable environment where investment ideas, diligence materials, analyst notes, and third-party research live in one place.

Succession planning underscores the need for a more structured research foundation. According to Bank of America’s Family Office Study (2025), 87% of family offices have yet to transition to the next generation, and 59% expect a leadership handover within the next decade. This looming generational shift heightens the risk of institutional knowledge loss, particularly when research is scattered across inboxes, individual folders, and personal note‑taking systems.

As new leaders step into decision‑making roles, often with different investment philosophies, governance expectations, and technology preferences, an RMS ensures continuity through a structured, reliable foundation for informed decision‑making.

Balancing agility with organization

One of the defining strengths of family offices is their ability to move with agility while maintaining a long-term perspective. Without the right infrastructure, fast‑moving teams risk losing context, duplicating work, or relying on memory rather than documented insights.

This challenge becomes especially visible in private markets such as private credit, where deal flow is often relationship‑driven, underwriting requires deep qualitative assessment, and ongoing monitoring is essential. With allocations to private credit continuing to grow across family office portfolios (source: BlackRock’s 2025 Family Office Survey), the volume of notes, third‑party materials, covenants, communications, and performance updates can quickly overwhelm informal processes. Left unmanaged, this complexity can slow even the most efficient teams.

Planning for what’s next

Ongoing growth and modernization make it essential for family offices to adopt practices that are both current and future‑ready.

In a world of increasing complexity, family offices that institutionalize their research infrastructure will be best positioned to collaborate efficiently, operate securely, and respond quickly to both risk and opportunity.