Partner content by Ethan Bonar, CEO of CFO Family.
On July 21, Goldman Sachs launched a new Alternative Investment Platform for wealthy clients and family offices. It offers direct access to later-stage private companies and a Secondary Advisory Group for private-market liquidity.
I spent 28 years inside the advisory world. I have seen what happens when a family's investments, reporting, and advice all flow through one counterparty.
The product is impressive, which is exactly why the questions matter.
One Counterparty, Three Roles
Families who use bundled offerings end up in the same position. Their investments live inside the platform. Their reporting is generated by the platform. Their advice comes from advisors compensated by the platform.
One counterparty holds three roles and a complete picture of the family's wealth, all inside a commercial relationship the family did not design from first principles.
This applies well beyond Goldman. Every wirehouse and every custodian is building a version of the same architecture. As the private wealth industry integrates more services under one umbrella, the opportunity to profit grows, and so does the potential for conflicts of interest.
The private markets angle raises the stakes further. Successful companies stay private longer, so your capital call records, performance history, and liquidity data can sit inside one platform's proprietary infrastructure for decades before an exit ever happens.
The Three Questions I Ask Before a Family Signs Anything
I use these three questions with every family evaluating a platform like this one:
Does this platform have a commercial relationship with any of my advisors, custodians, or managers? Commercial ties shape recommendations. You need to see the full map of who pays whom before you can trust the advice flowing through it.
If I leave, can I take my complete historical data with me, in usable form, on my own licenses? A PDF export of old statements is an archive. Usable data means tax lots, performance attribution, and entity context that a new system can actually ingest.
Who has access to my data outside the permissions I have explicitly granted? Your financial picture is an asset. You should know exactly who can see it and why.
Most families have never asked any of these. This is commonly overlooked, because the platforms work well right up until the day you want to leave.
Owning Your Data
Legal ownership on paper means little if the data lives in proprietary formats you cannot move. Jonathan Theberge, director of Wealth Services at KeyBank, put it plainly:
"You want to be sure you have the ability to transition away from a vendor and that their capabilities will keep up with your needs." (Family Wealth Report)
The numbers back this up. Nearly 70% of family offices still struggle with fragmented financial data despite significant investments in single-source-of-truth systems.
Technology alone fails to solve this. Architecture solves it. When the underlying data layer belongs to the family, on the family's licenses, with the family's credentials, the platform on top can change without erasing decades of history.
Independence Is a Structure, and You Can Build It
Independent reporting reflects prudence rather than distrust. It means owning the answer to those three questions regardless of which platform you are inside today or which one you move to next.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
Your licenses. Every reporting platform runs on contracts you hold directly.
Your credentials. Every login and every key belongs to your family from day one.
Your data pipelines. Feeds, reconciliation logic, and history live in infrastructure you control.
The families I work with set this up before they enter any bundled relationship. Then a platform like Goldman's becomes a tool they use on their own terms. The advisor can change. The platform can change. The data stays.
A family's complete financial history should compound across generations. Every relationship reset that wipes the record costs the next generation the context behind the assets they inherit. Ask the three questions first. Own the answers permanently.
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Ethan Bonar is the CEO of CFO Family, which builds reporting infrastructure that a family owns outright, independent of every advisor it employs, and permanent across every generation. Most investment offices lack the resources to hire and retain data-management experts. CFO Family restructures access to that expertise, giving every family office the operational capabilities of the world's most sophisticated institutions, without building the team to match.
