Northwestern Mutual launches family office services for clients with at least $50 million net worth

Northwestern Mutual on Sept. 29, 2026 announced Family Office Services, an offering aimed at clients with at least $50 million in net worth. The company says it will staff the service with more than 40 in-house specialists who partner with its advisors and teams nationwide.

The suite covers legal, tax, investment, banking and lending, philanthropy, legacy planning, risk management, and founder and business planning, according to the release. Northwestern Mutual describes the move as bringing family office capabilities into its advisor model at scale, and says the offering is designed for select clients rather than the full book.

"Many affluent families have strong individual advisors but lack coordination across their full financial picture," said John Roberts, the company's chief field officer, who the release says leads its wealth and investment management business. The team, he said, brings "those fractured and fragmented pieces together" by aligning investment, insurance, tax and legacy strategies.

Northwestern Mutual's 2026 Planning & Progress Study found that 52% of high-net-worth individuals, people with $1 million or more in investable assets, say their financial planning needs improvement. The same share say they place too much emphasis on growing wealth over protecting it from risks such as taxes, and one in four say they turned to a financial advisor for the first time last year.

That research is the company's own, so it functions as Northwestern Mutual's case for the launch rather than as independent demand data. The structural bet is a shared-resource one: the release frames the offering as a service layer inside the advisor model, not a separate advisory business built to court wealthy families directly. Forty-plus specialists supporting advisors nationwide is the capacity claim; the release does not put a number on how many client families the company expects the team to serve.