Why Hybrid Models Are Reshaping Family Office Management
As family wealth grows more complex, so too do the decisions around how it should be managed—often through a family office or similar structure. Global mobility, longer generational overlap, and increasingly diverse assets have pushed families to rethink traditional approaches. For many, the question is no longer whether families should professionalize—but how.
Wingspan Founder Christina Wing was recently interviewed by the Financial Times for a partner content feature produced in collaboration with Pictet Wealth Management, titled The Art of Wealth Management: A Hybrid Strategy for Family Assets. In the article, Christina and other global experts explore how families are navigating this evolving landscape. One clear takeaway emerges: the most resilient family office structures are rarely purely in-house or fully outsourced. They are hybrid by design.
From Capital Preservation to Long-Term Purpose
Historically, wealth management focused on protecting capital. Today, families are equally concerned with how wealth supports values, purpose, and continuity across generations. Christina’s perspective reflects this shift: managing wealth at scale is not simply an investment challenge, but an organizational one that requires clear systems, accountability, and long-term thinking—especially for families operating, or considering, a family office.
“A family office is a business, just like the family’s other ventures, and this will require upfront investment and incur ongoing costs. Only the very largest offices have sufficient scale to do everything in-house.”
That reality has prompted many families to pause before building everything internally. While control and alignment are powerful motivators, Christina emphasizes that they come with real cost and complexity. Many families discover that what initially feels like independence can quickly become operational strain without sufficient scale or support.
Why Hybrid Models Are Gaining Ground
Rather than viewing family offices and external managers as mutually exclusive, Christina highlights a growing recognition among families that combining internal capability with external partnership often produces stronger outcomes.
Internal teams tend to focus on areas where alignment matters most—values, long-term vision, and family governance—while external partners provide scale, specialist expertise, and institutional discipline. This balance allows families to retain intentional control without shouldering every operational burden themselves.
Importantly, Christina points out that hybrid models offer adaptability. They allow families to evolve as circumstances change, particularly during liquidity events, generational transitions, or shifts in investment strategy—moments when complexity tends to accelerate.
Governance Is the Differentiator
Across family office structures, Christina consistently underscores governance as the defining factor in long-term success. As families grow and ownership becomes more diffuse, clarity around decision-making, roles, and information flow becomes essential.
When governance is weak or undefined, even experienced professionals can become constrained—unsure when to act, subject to second-guessing, or disconnected from family priorities. Over time, this dynamic can strain both relationships and results.
Strong governance, by contrast, enables continuity. It helps families move beyond personality-driven decision-making and creates a framework that can support transitions and complexity across generations.
No Single Blueprint—Only Informed Choices
There is no universal model for managing family wealth or structuring a family office. Christina’s message reinforces that each family must strike its own balance between control and collaboration, privacy and openness.
What matters most is clarity of purpose: understanding why a particular structure exists, what it is designed to support, and how it should evolve over time. With trillions of dollars already shifting between generations, the consequences of unclear structures, misaligned governance, and reactive decision-making will only become more pronounced over the decades ahead.
As this transition unfolds, families who approach wealth management with realism and intention—recognizing both the limits of independence and the value of partnership—will be better positioned to steward not just their capital, but their relationships and legacy across generations.
