Whether Callan Family Office manages their investments or not, it will help families do things like pay bills and manage their cash.
Callan Family Office, an independent wealth management firm that leverages the resources of the investment consultant Callan and caters to clients worth at least $50 million, will begin offering its administrative services à la carte to single family offices.
In 2022, Jack Ginter and other executives of Abbot Downing — a $47 billion Wells Fargo group that worked with family offices and has since folded into its private bank — left to start Callan Family Office. The new firm has grown to manage $5 billion in assets for ultra-wealthy families and has offered a long list of other services for them such as paying their bills, managing their cash flow, and providing on-demand data about all their assets since inception.
Now, Callan is expanding, allowing single family offices to tap these services, even if Callan isn’t managing their investments.
Ginter, a partner and the CEO of Callan, said families initially engage his firm for a variety of reasons. Many single-family offices already employ in-house investment professionals or have hired a wealth management firm to build and mind their portfolios, so they are only interested in Callan’s help with administrative tasks. Those duties might seem mundane, but they are time consuming and critically important to any office, whether it’s one for a family or not, Ginter explained.
“Not every client, day one, necessarily wants to start with an asset management mandate. But what we see really clearly is that, whether it’s a large family or a single-family office, they often are coming to us with complexity,” Ginter said. “They’ve got multiple LLCs, they have personal assets, they have business assets, they have philanthropic assets. Yes, they want to see them all in one place, but they also want it to be seen by family members.”
For example, a few siblings might own or be the primary beneficiaries of a partnership or trust, but there could also be many more small stakeholders such as children and grandchildren. And clans often have a long list of entities like that so tracking the values, and distribution of cash, can get tangled fast.
Families today also want all that information delivered in the form of a personal balance sheet, something challenging to deliver without technology and professionals to fuse together a patchwork of custodians, Schedule K-1 forms and other sources of data. Even single-family offices, usually worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more, lack the scale to do that. The average family office has an average of only 14.4 employees.
Offering a platform to family offices to help them manage administrative tasks and their complex structures is not a novel idea. A growing list of private banks that includes J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, as well as accounting firms have groups that tend to the needs of the wealthiest families beyond investing.
Ginter says that Callan developed its platform so that it could be customized for each family and that will make it attractive in the marketplace. It will also be a way for them to get to know the wealth manager.
“We’re confident that if that’s the need and the starting point, it’s a great place to start a relationship with Callan Family Office,” Ginter said. “Our expectation over time is that these relationships will grow in different ways depending on what the needs are of the family or the single-family office.”
