Citi's family office survey finds patient capital and an unsolved handover

More than 350 family offices answered the 2026 Global Family Office Report from Citi Wealth, and ninety per cent reported positive portfolio returns since the start of 2026; the figure sitting next to it is the one worth slowing down for, because more than 40 per cent made no major changes to their portfolios at all. The report describes a client base that hedged, ran money actively and adjusted at the margin through geopolitical turmoil instead of repositioning wholesale, crediting long-term discipline as the edge that made the year work. Permanent capital can afford to sit still, and the survey reads throughout like a client base that knows it.

Forty-one per cent of respondents still aim for annual returns of 7 to 10 per cent, and the report's own read is that clients are confident without being complacent: returns are described as adequate while inflation, interest rate moves, financial stability and market volatility fill the worry list in that order. Tariffs and trade disputes, which led that list in 2025, have faded hard, and the reordering matters because the two leading concerns are the ones that punish patience, the very behaviour the report is praising; the survey leaves that tension exactly where it found it.

Almost half of respondents added to public equities this year, making listed equities the top destination for new capital, with global developed equities the most favoured class for future net allocations. Set against an inflation worry, that is a bet on earnings carrying price increases through, an inference the report does not make, though the two findings sit awkwardly together. Set against the transition count further down, it is the trade this publication identified when the first pass at these numbers landed: a client base adding daily-priced assets in the same year it concedes the handover is unresolved.

Private markets remain a strategic pillar of these portfolios, but the movement inside the pillar runs toward direct investing outside collective structures, with family offices reporting that they are more selective and leaning harder on sourcing, expertise and differentiated access. If you sell private-markets wrappers to wealthy families, this is the finding to argue with: the on-ramp is now the product and the gateway is the M&A target, and on this evidence the half of that thesis which survives intact is the access. A feeder fund's appeal has always rested on sourcing as much as structure, and these clients are saying they would rather buy the sourcing directly, which means the gateways that hold share will be the ones selling access as a service rather than a structure with a fee layered on top. The survey does not report what these offices pay for that access, the figure that would settle the argument.

The mandate the survey sizes most precisely has nothing to do with allocation: about one-third of respondents expect leadership transitions in their family, their family office or their family business, and the report finds these organisations professionalising outside investing in operational planning, succession and organisational development — governance, in other words, booked as a purchase order — and Citi is staffing against it. The bank hired Adam Clark, who ran a 500-professional global trusts and estates operation at J.P. Morgan, to lead Citi Wealth's planning chain from November, and in September it brought in three executives from competing private banks.

A firm that publishes the demand-side research and then hires the supply side is telling the market where it thinks the fee sits, and the succession finding is the cleanest services mandate in the report: trusts, estates, planning and governance are the piece of the family-office relationship that scales like a platform instead of a book of clients. Whether that is the right bet is the judgment call the survey invites. The allocations took care of themselves this year — ninety per cent of these offices made money, most of them by doing very little — which is the argument for selling the planning layer rather than the portfolio. Citi's answer, a planner-in-chief with a trusts and estates pedigree plus a platform-experience hire from MSCI, is a wager that the next fee pool in family wealth sits in the org chart rather than the allocation. On the evidence here it is a sound one, though what the survey does not show is how many of these families will pay a bank for process they have historically handled in-house.

AI turns up where the report expects it, deployed across investment analysis, information management, reporting, workflow automation and decision support, and that inventory is worth reading closely: four of the five functions are internal, and the report lists no client-facing deployment at all. That is conspicuous against the direction the rest of the wealth industry is travelling, where the AI premium has moved to the governed client record and the meeting that confirms it; family offices, on this reading, have automated the middle office and left the client relationship alone.

Family wealth is also getting harder to pin to one jurisdiction, with respondents reporting assets, businesses and family members spread across multiple countries, which turns a governance mandate into a multi-jurisdiction one and gives a new head of planning a second reason to exist.

Citi's planner-in-chief starts in November with the number already in hand: about a third of these families expect a transition. That is the piece of the relationship which does not move with the market, and the bank has just staffed it.