What is a family office actually for?
Cassie Robinson in conversation with Urszula Swierczynska, Impact and Philanthropy Director at Partners For Change family office.
Family offices are famously discreet. They’re designed, in part, so that the rest of us never think about them. PFC, an Italian family office constituted as a Benefit Corporation, has taken a different approach: their portfolio is public, annual reports are published, family names are on the website. Urszula Swierczynska, Impact and Philanthropy Director, came to private wealth via the United Nations, international development and then years as a philanthropic advisor — drawn by a kind of capital flexible enough to serve the public good. Which is why I wanted to start with the biggest question I had.
What's changed about the world that makes the old family office model insufficient?
I'm actually not sure “insufficient” is fair. Traditional family offices were designed to solve a particular problem: preserving assets, managing risk, supporting succession. Many still do that exceptionally well. The traditional model remains necessary. It is just no longer sufficient on its own. The role has expanded.
What has changed is the context. Today’s world is shaped by interconnected challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, technological disruption, rising inequality. The defining feature of this century is not simply that there is more private wealth. It is that wealth has become increasingly concentrated, giving private wealth and the institutions that steward it unprecedented influence over our economies, democracies and societies.
That creates a different kind of responsibility. Family offices are no longer simply participants in financial markets; they are participants in shaping the conditions under which markets and societies evolve. The question is no longer whether wealth has influence. It is how intentionally and responsibly that influence is exercised.
If a family office is a vehicle, what is it a vehicle for, and what can it do that simply hiring wealth managers cannot?
When I was studying family offices, I found a metaphor in the literature that truly resonated: Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions and passages, depicted with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. One face looks to the past: the family’s history, the values that shaped it, the wealth it has created and the legacy it has inherited. The other looks to the future: the generations still to come, the long-term stewardship of capital and the responsibility to adapt to a changing world.
The metaphor goes further. A family office isn't only balancing past and future; it is balancing two dimensions of wealth. It stewards financial capital, ensuring assets endure over time. And it stewards the family's identity: its purpose, values, relationships, reputation and the role it wishes to play in society. Preserving those intangible forms of capital is every bit as important as preserving financial wealth.
We don’t see the family office simply as a vehicle for preserving wealth. We see it as an institution for stewarding wealth's relationship with society. The destination is not a financial target but a long-term aspiration: contributing to a more inclusive and sustainable economy. Our role is to help the family keep asking a deeper question: what is this wealth for? And to ensure that every decision moves consistently in that direction.
There’s a version of the family office that exists mainly to protect a family from the world. And a version that exists to connect a family to the world. Where does PFC sit?
Protection will always be part of it. It is, after all, one of the reasons family offices exist. But it is about much more than protecting assets. It is about ensuring a family’s ability to remain united across generations, preserving the values and purpose behind the wealth and, increasingly, protecting the family’s legitimacy in the eyes of society.
Private wealth does not exist in isolation; it exists within society. For some family offices, the question is no longer simply, “How do we preserve the wealth?” but rather, “Why do we have it, and what obligations come with it?”
The risk is that protection becomes a bubble. The very mechanisms designed to safeguard a family’s wealth can also distance the family from the realities, responsibilities and relationships that give that wealth meaning. Decisions become outsourced, relationships become transactional and wealth is managed as something to be preserved rather than something to be stewarded.
We view the PFC family office as a bridge rather than a fortress.
Within our team, we have invested in dedicated communication capabilities to encourage transparency and dialogue, both internally and externally. But communication is only one part of the picture. Engaging openly with the wider ecosystem is also part of our stewardship mandate, alongside our commitments to investing and philanthropy. We see advocacy as a core pillar of our strategy for contributing to systemic change.
Most family offices keep investment, philanthropy and governance in separate boxes. PFC has integrated them. What does this make possible?
Many family offices operate with a separate-buckets logic: this is how we make money, and this is how we “do good.” When those functions operate independently, each can become highly effective at its own objectives while unintentionally working against the others. Investments may generate returns without considering their wider social or environmental consequences. Philanthropy may end up addressing problems that emerge elsewhere in the portfolio. Governance may focus on preserving wealth without asking what that wealth is ultimately for.
Our starting point is different. We operate with a Total Impact Portfolio logic. We begin with the question: what change are we trying to contribute to? Only then do we ask how the different forms of capital available to us can best support that ambition.
Integration does not eliminate trade-offs, but it changes the quality of the questions we ask. Instead of “What should we invest in?” or “What should we fund?”, we ask a broader question: “How can every form of capital we steward contribute to the same long-term vision?”
This matters if your ambition is systems change. Systems rarely change through a single intervention. An investment can demonstrate that a new business model is viable. Philanthropy can support the early-stage innovation that markets may not yet be ready to fund. Advocacy can help shift the policies and narratives those innovations need in order to scale. Together, these approaches can reinforce one another.
And we stay humble: no family office is going to solve climate change or inequality on its own. The emphasis therefore shifts from attribution, asking what change did we alone create, to contribution, asking how did our actions help move the system in the right direction? In complex systems, claiming credit is rarely useful. Making a thoughtful, sustained contribution is.
How do you navigate the moments when family values, financial return and impact ambition pull in different directions?
Those tensions are inevitable and, in many ways, healthy. If they never arise, you are probably not asking difficult enough questions. The challenge is not to avoid tension, but to create governance that allows it to be surfaced, discussed openly, and worked through constructively. There is no magic formula. What matters is making trade-offs explicit rather than allowing them to remain hidden, anchored in a shared purpose. In practice, four instruments have mattered most.
The first is the Family Constitution: a living document that is updated over time with the support of an external professional. More than a governance document, it serves as an anchor for the family's shared purpose, rooted in values rather than preferences. Preferences change; values are far more enduring. When a family invests the time to articulate the values that truly define it, those values become a shared compass, something to return to whenever difficult decisions or disagreements arise.
The second is a decision-making practice that separates individual judgement from group dynamics. On difficult decisions, the key points are presented neutrally and initial votes are collected anonymously. Each family member then has the opportunity to explain their reasoning, followed by a second public round where people can change their minds based on what they have heard. And they often do. Anonymous voting protects honesty, while the process itself creates space for genuine reflection and persuasion.
The third is establishing clear policies. For instance, a conflict-of-interest framework with transparent rules around which personally preferred projects can and cannot be supported through the family’s philanthropy.
And fourth is something we don’t do enough as family offices: learning together. Facilitated workshops, most recently on legacy and training in nonviolent communication for both shareholders and the team help us develop the skills needed to navigate the inevitable complexity of wealth across generations. A family office is ultimately a human system and its long-term resilience depends not only on how capital is managed, but on how relationships are cared for.
If you were advising someone considering taking on the design of their family office, what would say to them?
The technical one: don’t fall into the trap of treating different parts of your wealth as separate worlds. Your investments, philanthropy, governance and family purpose are all connected. The opportunity is to design a family office where they reinforce one another rather than operate independently.
And the more visionary one: put the inner work and the financial work together, and make sure there is a tangible connection between them. Having visionary objectives is one thing; translating them into practice is the real work.
And when it comes to people: don't hire only for technical brilliance. The people around you need the openness to engage in genuine dialogue with family members, each with their own paths and priorities. This is a relationship built on trust: understanding people's motivations, listening carefully and helping them translate their aspirations into meaningful action.
If family offices collectively redesigned themselves around what this century demands, what might be different in twenty years, and what is stopping them now?
I hope we’d see family offices recognised not simply as custodians of private wealth, but as long-term stewards of the systems on which both prosperity and wellbeing depend.
That does not mean every family pursuing the same causes. It means recognising that every family office already shapes the world through the choices it makes. Every investment, every grant, every vote as a shareholder, every partnership sends signals about the kind of economy we are helping to build. The question is whether we do it intentionally.
I also hope we’d move beyond measuring success solely in financial terms. Financial performance will always matter, but it tells only part of the story. We need to recognise social and environmental costs and benefits alongside financial ones, rather than treating them as externalities for someone else to bear. Building an impact economy requires expanding our definition of value itself.
As for what’s stopping it, I don’t think it’s a lack of capital. It’s that many of the institutions, incentives and mental models surrounding wealth were designed for a different era, one in which financial value was largely separated from social and environmental value. Changing governance structures or investment policies is relatively straightforward. Changing our understanding of what constitutes value, and therefore what good stewardship looks like, takes much longer.