Advent’s main mission towards family offices is to help professionalize their investment processes, in particular by giving them greater insight into their balance sheets and helping optimise their data analysis processes, says Martin Engdal (pictured), Director of Product Marketing at Advent Software EMEA…

What it’s really all about is technology, processes and people. When you have the right systems and data and the right processes to find the information you need, then with the right people in place you can truly start managing the family’s expectations, as well as your real portfolio risk.

After the upheavals of the last few years, family offices cannot just rely on their custodians’ statements anymore. To understand their total exposure, family offices need a system that will enable them to do shadow accounting and to consolidate all the assets they have across their custodians, including non-financial ones. Only then will they be able to monitor and manage the wide variety of risks that need to be considered such as counterparty, market or liquidity risks.