Software built to safeguard legacy

Wealthy families have become more geographically dispersed than ever, and this applies to both how they invest as well as where they’re located.

Ocorian’s study showed that 60% of family offices surveyed have opened additional offices in different jurisdictions over the past five years, while UBS reported that 88% of family offices report having bankable assets in two or more jurisdictions.

With family members scattered around the world, approaching sensitive discussion points and key governance decisions isn’t as easy as just gathering everyone in the dining room.

This is where things can quickly start to go wrong, particularly when it comes to trust and relationships with advisors.

It’s no surprise then that there’s dedicated software today that aims to counter these challenges.

This week we spoke with Arnaud de Coninck, Chief Revenue Officer at Trusted Family, a platform that he describes as “designed to be the full operating system for family businesses, family offices and their advisors, giving them a single, secure environment to structure how people, information, and decisions come together across entities, committees, and generations.”

de Coninck tells us that Trusted Family was born from a singular idea: that families thrive when they stay connected.

It was started in 2007 by two next-gen leaders that were faced with the geographic challenges modern families face.

“Their families were growing, spreading across geographies, and navigating increasingly complex governance. The original goal was to strengthen the affectio societatis, the sense of belonging that holds a business family together, and to break the pattern where most families lose alignment by the third generation.”

He says they wanted a better way to share information, stay aligned across distance, and prepare for the future.

And what began as a solution for their own families evolved into a platform used by over 200 families across 35 countries today.

One of these is a seventh generation family with more than 200 shareholders, with wealth that stems from a 150-year old business. de Coninck highlighted them as a prime example for just how user friendly the software is, citing direct feedback on the platform from the client:

“From our 95-year-old cousin to our youngest family members, everyone has picked it up, and it is helping us stay together as a family.”

We asked him to share more on Trusted Family as a company, tech solution and what makes it unique.

What is the overarching mission of the company today?

Our mission is to help family businesses and family offices operate at maximum capacity with their key board members, shareholders, family members, and advisors. We think of ourselves as the operating system for these families and their advisors. The decisions they make have a real impact on the world we live in, and we help them create transparency, clarity, efficiency, and alignment through technology that is genuinely simple to use.

How big is the team, and where are you located?

We are a team of around 25 people worldwide, headquartered in Brussels, with offices in Austin, Texas, and Lisbon, Portugal, and team members reaching further afield, including Latin America and the Middle East. That global footprint is deliberate. Our clients are spread across 35 countries, and having people close to them, in their time zones and languages, is part of how we serve them well.

What are the core features that set Trusted Family apart from other offerings?

First, we are purpose-built for family businesses, family offices, and their advisors. It is designed from the ground up for how these families actually operate, by family members who perfectly understand the challenges they are facing.

Second, we bring the whole picture into one platform (de Coninck notes an extensive list here, including family engagement and collaboration workspaces; events and meetings, with agendas, pre-reads, RSVPs, minutes, and decisions in one place; a task management system; secure vaults for sharing and storing highly confidential documents; a structured path for Next Gen readiness; and more).

Third, the platform is backed by a dedicated success team that helps families put governance into practice. We strive to be more than just software they log into; we are a real partner in doing the work.

Fourth, every customer gets full access to our community. That means in-person conferences, the Trusted Family community platform, and TF Connect, where families can connect and learn from one another and know they are not navigating these challenges alone.

We were built by families, for families, and that shapes every part of the experience.

How has AI influenced how the platform operates?

Today, the clearest impact is on engagement. Some of our customers are using AI to create genuinely compelling content on their family platform, from design to written updates, which lifts participation and keeps more of the family actively involved rather than passively informed. For a multi-generational family spread across the world, that difference in engagement is significant, and AI is helping our clients close it.

Looking ahead, we're building something more fundamental: an AI that genuinely understands your family and turns insight into action, inside an ultra-secure environment. For a family running decades of decisions, documents, and relationships on one platform, that means surfacing what matters before it becomes urgent, without ever compromising on the privacy families trust us with.

That last point is the one that governs everything. In a category built on discretion, AI only earns a place if it makes families safer and better informed, never at the expense of their privacy. That's the standard we hold every AI capability to.

What is commonly misunderstood about the role of tech in governance?

The biggest misconception is that technology creates good governance. It doesn't. Governance is a set of human decisions: who gets a say, how those decisions get made, and how the family stays aligned as it grows. Technology can't make those choices for you, and any platform that claims it can is overselling.

What technology does, however, is make good governance possible to sustain at scale. A family of 5 can run on trust and a group chat. A family of eighty, spread across four generations and a dozen countries, cannot. That's where informal systems quietly break: a decision made in one branch surprises another, a document circulates and no one knows who read it, the shareholder picture lives in someone's head. The structure was fine; it just couldn't hold as the family grew. Technology is what lets the structure hold.

The second misunderstanding follows from the first: that tech in governance is really about efficiency, saving time, and replacing paperwork. Efficiency is a nice byproduct, but it's not the point. The point is trust. When everyone can see the same information, knows a decision was made properly, and can trust that the right people were involved, the family makes better decisions and stays together through hard ones.

So the honest way to put it: technology doesn't govern a family. It gives a growing, complex family the infrastructure and the ability to govern itself well, which is something that gets exponentially harder without it.

Can you share an example of the platform significantly helping a family?

One that stands out is a Southern US family, seventh generation now, with more than 200 shareholders behind a business their founder started over 150 years ago. When we first spoke, they were running everything on a generic file-sharing system and it just wasn't working for them.

The less technical members couldn't really get the hang of it, and when that happens in a family that size, you start losing whole branches. They'd actually looked at us a couple of years earlier and decided they weren't ready, so this wasn't a snap decision.

Then they moved everything onto Trusted Family, one central portal, with documents distributed straight to the family's vaults. What changed was how the family worked day to day. The chairman said it best at our client conference: they'd gone all-in and stopped sending emails.

That's really the goal for us. Getting a whole family, from the members in their nineties down to the youngest ones, actually operating in the same place.

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