Research: What exactly is FOX and what do you do?
Benevides
:
At our core, we are a research and advisory firm that provides service to a broad network of just over 550 entities focused in the family wealth part of the marketplace. That includes over 300 dedicated family offices and the
remainder are
multi-family offices and wealth advisory firms. In terms of what we do, we do a combination of proprietary research, strategy and benchmarking work on both wealth owners and best practices in running multi-family advisory firms. We bring the network together via a number of venues, including 24/7 list servers that connect the multi-family offices, their CEOs and the wealth owners themselves. This gives them a vehicle to ask questions and get answers directly and helps us at an aggregate level to understand how this part of the marketplace is evolving.
What are you seeing?
As we look at this space, it’s surprisingly fragmented in our opinion. We’re probably at the end of the first inning of the game. In the classic evolution of any industry, that phase comes with lots of opportunity, lots of activity as people are trying to set their shingle out and stake their claim to a piece of real estate. That is, I think, where we are right now. The good news is there are lots of players and a lot of activity. The challenge is there’s a lot of noise in the system right now; that creates a lot of confusion for everyone and like any other marketplace confusion, it always hurts some players and helps other players.
How do you help advisors navigate that confusion?
We help them understand at a much more detailed analytic level not only what the buying behaviors of this marketplace are, but the drivers behind these behaviors. We help them understand their client or prospect like no one else. The second thing we do is if we’re doing our job well, we help them understand how to best manage their own multi-family-office business. We’re like McKinsey; we have a management consulting bent, so we help advisors think about team structure, pricing, service mix. If you are new to this marketplace, the value is evident. If you’re an existing player who’s been in this business for a long time, you want information on all the competition coming into the marketplace and all the new wealth at this level coming into the marketplace from the other side. The dynamic of the business is changing. It’s not the same old business, so there’s a benefit there in really trying to understand how the sands are shifting.