Robertson Stephens, a $7 billion wealth management firm with a distant history of investment banking for Pixar, E-Trade, Seagate and other technology companies, always planned to create its own version of a family office.
This month, after years of waiting and periodic meetings, it hired Bruce Stewart to realize its vision.
“We've been thinking about this stuff for a very long time. We've been meeting people associated with the space for seven years, and part of our impetus for jumping into this pool now was that we found Bruce,” Raj Bhattacharyya, CEO of Robertson Stephens, told Modus.
In 2002, Stewart, a vice president of manager research at J.P. Morgan, left the bank to help build an office for a family in Boston and then stayed for eight years as its chief investment officer. The move, at a time when there were far fewer single-family offices, started him down a career path woven with the wealthiest private inventors. He went on to become co-head of investments at TD Bank’s wealth management division and then the global head of investments at BNY Mellon, where he led portfolio management of over $10 billion in assets for the global family office business (as well as the interim head of BNY Mellon Canada).
For the past six years, Stewart has been a managing partner and CIO of Spartan Risk Solutions, a consultancy that specializes in developing family offices and serves as an OCIO. He built offices for four families and oversaw $23 billion of their wealth there.
“Back in the day, when people were talking about the family office space, we would talk about it as a cottage industry. That was the term people threw around, and it has evolved a lot, especially over the last 10 years. Real professionals have been brought in from Wall Street to manage that wealth who weren't there 20 years ago,” Stewart said.
He added: “Families have become more aware and more intelligent around what their needs are and what a single-family office may or may not feel like versus a multifamily office. So the clarity around the segments — what is multifamily or a single-family office — is getting to be better understood by families out there, not just people like us. That's a good thing, and I think that's part of the reason why we're here.”
There were already professionals with family-office experience at Robertson Stephens before Stewart’s arrival. Bhattacharyya led capital markets divisions at Deutsche Bank and founded a venture capital firm before becoming the chief executive. Stuart Katz, CIO of Robertson Stephens, is the former president of the Heyman Enterprise, the family office of a multibillionaire. Other employees have previously worked for wealth managers, such as Iconiq Capital, which counts some of the wealthiest families in the world as clients.
Stewart has been tasked with creating a compelling offering alongside what Robertson Stephens currently provides: something between a multifamily office and a single-family office.
According to Stewart, establishing a single-family office requires a significant investment, with the cost of setting up one of “institutional quality” ranging from $3 million to $7 million.“There's a group of families out there who don't want to make that big investment to build their own single-family office. We want to deliver a single-family office experience to those families that are not having their needs met at the traditional multifamily offices today. I think that's the clearest way to say this,” he said.
Along with investment management, financial and estate planning, and other services typically provided by wealth managers, Robertson Stephens will offer family education, personal concierge, property management, emergency services, cyber and physical security, and a “chief medical officer.” Much of this will be outsourced, Stewart noted. The firm isn't going to purchase helicopters and hire pilots to conduct rescue missions in remote areas or evacuate clients from local natural disasters. But it will have a reliable partner to call in those circumstances. (Stewart helped facilitate an urgent evacuation during Hurricane Helene last fall.)
To be sure, many wealth managers already have or are adding more robust in-house services or are using expansive networks of third parties that cater to the wealthiest clients. In recent years, UBS has added an art specialist in North America to work with families, and Goldman Sachs launched an expanded family-office platform in November.
"Our clients are consistently coming to us for advice on how to shift their services upmarket regardless of who they serve now or what channel they’re in. And it makes sense, as the high-net-worth space has grown significantly more rapidly than the broad retail market — and especially the UHNW and centimillionaire tiers of wealth who have shown the fastest levels of growth," Chayce Horton, a senior analyst at the consultancy Cerulli Associates, told Modus.
In the U.S. alone, there are over 100,000 households with more than $50 million in investable assets, and the average one has over $120 million of investable wealth, excluding their privately held business and personal residences, according to Cerulli. There are a lot of potential clients seeking something between the typical wealth manager and their own family office, albeit the competition for them is greater.
The difference between Robertson Stephens and other wealth managers, Stewart says, will be the ongoing attention to a curated group of third parties and the overall level of service.
“If you're in a single-family office, you're picking up the phone in the first or second ring at almost any hour of the day. You're incredibly responsive. So the quality of service, the quality of curation, all these soft parts, are paramount to what we want to deliver for our clients,” he said.
Families may have some employees, and Stewart and his team will collaborate with them. The goal is to augment however much or little of a family office already exists. No particular process will be forced on any of the clients.
“It's going to be service on their terms,” Stewart said. “The idea is never to say no. You don't want to say no; that's not how a family office works. Maybe at an RIA, it's a different deal, but in a family office, the objective is to get the yes every time.”
This week, I spoke with Asora CEO Adam Cleland about why he started the company and how it helps family offices. But first, I asked him: Why the name Asora? The name is a combination of “as” from the Latin word astūtus, meaning insightful, and “ora” the Latin word for hour.
When you started the company in 2021, you joined a list of other reporting software. There was room for another? Definitely. There are thousands of single-famly and multifamily offices that need powerful software to track and oversee their assets but, for budget and personnel reasons, they still struggle to properly manage their data and make the best-informed decisions. That's where Asora comes in.
Can you share an example of Asora's impact at a family office? In almost all cases, we can deliver a single source of truth and powerful insights while also saving them money. We've helped an Australian client reduce files being sent via email by over 50% to ensure secure document storage. A Thai SFO is saving 60% of time spent gathering and reconciling data.
Asora is based in Ireland and has clients across the globe, but you're making a push in North America, right? That's right. There's a huge market here, we just hired another person in the U.S. and are onboarding around 2-3 offices every month.
How do family offices decide if they need Asora or should switch to it? Easy — schedule a short demo and call with us.
Other News
- Hot off the CTA press: FinCEN announced yesterday evening that it will not impose fines or penalties or take enforcement actions against companies that fail to file or update beneficial ownership information (BOI) reports by the current deadline. The bureau also said it will issue an interim final rule that extends BOI reporting deadlines to no later than March 21. “The ping-pong game continues, the yo-yo keeps bouncing,” attorneys at Burns, Figa & Will in Colorado wrote in a recent paper with a complete timeline of the Corporate Transparency Act, along with their takes.
- To get clean, one month at Passages Malibu can cost $80,000. What Happens When That Isn’t Enough?
- Rockefeller Capital Management joined the growing list of financial service firms that have scrubbed their website of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Pitchbook’s Jessica Hamlin reported in her Capital Pool newsletter.
- Are you team passive or active? Wendy Li, founder of Ivy Invest and formerly of Cabrini Health, UJA-Federation and the Met Museum, reminded everyone in her newsletter, Ask a CIO, that “there’s a fine line between being principled and being dogmatic. Market regimes tend not to stay static, and what looks obvious and correct today may not look so in 10 years’ time.”
- The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People. The highest-earning 10% of Americans account for half of all spending. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.
- And among the wealthiest are the 24 superbillionaires — all worth more than $50 billion — whose fortunes accounted for more than 16% of all billionaire wealth, up from 4% in 2014. Their combined net worth totaled $3.3 trillion, equivalent to the nominal GDP of France.
- Today, half of all of Scotland’s private rural land is owned by a total of about 420 landowners. How much should one person be allowed to control?
- A Fyre Festival Sequel? What Could Go Wrong?
Jobs
- Krause Group, the parent company of the Parma Calico and Des Moines Menace soccer teams, a vineyard, a real estate development company, and previously the convenience store chain Kum & Go, is looking for a new head of the family office and other roles. The family’s primary operating business was sold in 2023, and it’s now undergoing a “significant transformation, including a desire to scale, and become a sustainable, multi-generational family office for future generations.”
- Walton Enterprises is looking for an investment analyst to join the Walton Investment Team, known as “WIT,” in Washington, D.C. This hire will help manage family investments and foundation portfolios. The salary range was only up to $107,000, so you will not be moving to Georgetown unless you’re willing to have roommates.
- Novastone Capital Advisors, a “rapidly growing Swiss investment firm founded by a consortium of single-family offices that solves succession challenges in small to medium-sized enterprises through our Operator-Led Search Fund Program,” is looking for a head of portfolio management.
Other Stuff
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Where I'll be in...
- New York City, where this week, the first of several false springs occurred as the temperature hit 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius). Will it snow two more times before May? I’ll take the over…
- Miami at Future Proof Citywide March 16-19. I’m moderating a panel about family office governance with two GREAT guests. Don’t miss it.
- Palm Springs.
