With the global economic growth of the past several decades, and billionaires minted every other day in Asia and within the international technology sector, the family office has risen to grand prominence as more super-rich seek close, sustained management and successful transfer of generational wealth. As might be expected by the name, a family office is a private, nearly in-house wealth-management shop for a high-net-worth family. There also are “multi-family” offices that serve several families.

Family offices do not have to register anywhere, so no authoritative tallies of the number or size of family offices globally exist. Nevertheless, insights can be gleaned from industry surveys: 311 family offices responded to a 2018 survey by Swiss investment bank UBS, and of those more than two-thirds had been created since 2000. Only a sliver of present-day family offices existed before 1990.

The average amount managed by a family office in 2017 was $1.1 billion, and a