Deloitte, a leading global professional services firm, has released new research on North American family offices. The work highlights a familiar operational fault line in wealth management. I finds persistent underinvestment in the technology that runs day-to-day operations which results in drag on close speed, reconciliation effort, and execution risk as allocations to private markets grow. Deloitte’s research, finds that many North American family offices still lag on core back-office technology, and that gap translates into slower closes, heavier reconciliation workloads, and higher execution risk as portfolios tilt toward alternatives.
According to the report, 27 percent of North America-based family offices consider themselves underinvested in the systems needed to run day-to-day operations. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, “More than a quarter of North America-based family offices report being underinvested in operational technology,” a signal that readiness is uneven even among sophisticated organizations.
The operational consequences are stark. When documents from private funds and direct deals arrive in inconsistent formats and timelines, manual intake creates a bottleneck. That noise carries forward into the month-end close, variance analysis, audit tie-outs, and on-demand reporting for principals. The Journal situates this as a governance problem as much as a tooling problem. That is, without a clear roadmap for data capture and a single source of accounting truth, effort shifts from analysis to assembly.
Context from adjacent coverage suggests the picture is improving but patchy. External summaries of the same Deloitte study note that roughly four in ten family offices are developing or rolling out new technology this year, while a meaningful minority still lack a coherent strategy, reinforcing the uneven state of readiness.
What to watch next is execution quality. The offices that will bend the curve are prioritizing accurate intake of alternative-investment documents, standardizing accounting workflows, and building analytics on governed data rather than stitched exports. That sequence shortens cycle time and reduces exception risk without ballooning headcount—useful in volatile markets when principals want look-through exposure and cash forecasts on short notice.
Source
Wall Street Journal CFO Journal, Family offices tech lag could cause significant risks, published by Deloitte and the WSJ CFO Journal.
