What Makes Family Office Tech Partnerships Work Over Time?

By Jessica Parker, founder of JP Advisory.

Having sat on both sides of the table, inside a family office and on the vendor side, I expected this piece to land on tidy themes like understanding, communication, and trust.

I reached out to family office practitioners and technology vendors and asked them all the same question: what makes these relationships actually work over time?

The answers were more honest and varied than I expected, and in a few places both sides were navigating the same tensions without realising it. 

The focus here is on technology vendors specifically, though many of the dynamics will feel familiar to anyone managing long-term advisory or service provider relationships in a family office.

The word used across both family offices and vendors when describing the conditions for building a long-term partnership was curiosity.

As one operations lead at a multi-family office said: “If the team on the other side does not intuitively grasp what a family office actually is, you spend enormous energy translating. The vendors that get it right are curious about your business beyond the implementation scope.”

Michael Pacheco, Director of Sales at PCR, made a related point: “The strongest partners always diagnose before they prescribe.” Getting to the point of diagnosing requires genuine curiosity about the current challenges and environment.

Vendors who do this well build structure around curiosity. George Wilson, CEO of ONDA, launches every engagement with an in-depth face-to-face workshop. Without this approach, he argues, you cannot truly understand what a client wants to achieve, what success looks like or what they expect from the partnership.

Craig Pearson, CEO of Private Wealth Systems, encourages family offices to go deeper: ask not just “what” a system does, but “how” and “why.” Family offices that ask better questions get better outcomes.

When both sides invest in the upfront conversation properly, not as a box-ticking exercise but as a genuine effort to understand the complexity, the rest of the relationship gets easier. These foundations are what the partnership is built on.

However, there is a natural tension here: the family office needs to make a decision; the vendor needs to make a sale. Finding the right depth of conversation without turning the sales process into an indefinite discovery exercise requires good faith from both sides.

Curiosity only works if both sides are willing to let the other in. Privacy is a defining characteristic of this space and the instinct toward discretion is well-founded, however multiple people from both sides pointed to the cost of secrecy when it prevents a vendor from doing their job well.

Ashley Whittaker, President at FundCount made this point directly: many family offices are overly secretive about their operations with vendors. You cannot expect a vendor to deliver what you want if you do not explain the need, the cause, and the rationale. They shared the example of a family office that procured a product from a reputable vendor only to walk away mid-implementation because they discovered it could not handle unitised funds. That gap should have surfaced before any contract was signed, but the conditions for that conversation had never been created.

The operations lead at a multi-family office described the other side of the same coin: the relationships we trust most are the ones where the vendor will tell us something is not working, or is not on the roadmap, before we have built a workflow around it. That kind of candour is rare and worth a lot.

This was one of the clearest examples of both sides navigating the same tension from opposite ends. The vendor sees a family office that will not share enough. The family office sees a vendor that doesn’t flag problems early enough. 

Some vendors are addressing this head on. Chirag Nanavati, Managing Director of Asset Vantage, described an approach built on setting clear boundaries from the start: they are honest upfront about what they will and will not solve, which in turn makes it easier for the family office to be open about what they actually need.

The point is not that every family office should hand over the keys, it is that the level of access should be a deliberate decision. Ask the vendor what they need from you to do this well, and weigh that against what you are comfortable sharing, recognising that withholding context has a cost even when the instinct to do so is understandable.

Even when curiosity and openness are there, the implementation will test the relationship. 

Janeen France, Chief Client Officer at Addepar, put it well: “Family offices rarely struggle because of technology - they struggle because of the complexity underneath it. The partnerships that work are the ones where both sides are willing to confront messy data, fragmented workflows, and evolving investment structures head-on.”

Most professional relationships in a family office have clear lines. This is the case with accountants, lawyers, tax advisers. Technology is different, and this can be unfamiliar for many family offices. 

I remember experiencing this firsthand when I was working inside a family office. The way our technology vendor’s client success manager approached problems caught me off guard at first. Rather than delivering a fix the way an accountant or lawyer would, they treated challenges as something we were working through together. It took me a while to adjust, but once I did, I came to genuinely value it. When I moved to the vendor side, I learned to name that dynamic early rather than hope people would adjust on their own. However, that collaborative dynamic only matters if it survives past the initial implementation.

That is when the real test begins: do both sides stay engaged once the initial project is behind them?

A CFO at a family office: “It makes a real difference when vendors work alongside us through those changes, raise issues early, and treat challenges as shared problems to solve together.”

One family office manager identified a specific structural reason: staff turnover. Every quality that makes a partnership work becomes dramatically harder to sustain when the person who built the knowledge leaves.

But this is not a one-sided problem. I have seen family offices contribute to their own implementation struggles. Assigning the most junior person to manage the vendor relationship, treating data migration as the vendor’s problem when the underlying data governance has never been addressed, or expecting a platform to work out of the box without investing internal time in configuration and testing. The family offices that get the best outcomes are those that resource the relationship properly on their side too.

The vendors who are getting this right treat sustained engagement as an active discipline. Darragh McKay, Account Exec at Asora described it as treating trust as an active job: “Reliable service, fast and transparent support, and a constant loop of listening and iterating.” This goes both ways, going on to say that “it works best when the office stays engaged and keeps priorities clear as needs evolve.” Larry Rudman, CEO of Caprimo, argued that long-term partnerships won’t develop when parties fail to commit the right resources up front. The people involved must remain through discovery, implementation, and bedding down.

Henk Jan Kinds, Partner at Pretim captured this well: “It will look different in year five than it did on day one. What makes it work is a mutual respect for each other’s path, and the honesty to navigate the hard moments without losing sight of the shared direction.” 

Not everyone agreed on when, or whether, a vendor relationship tips over into something closer to partnership, but Jay McNamara, CEO of Masttro, described a clear inflection point: “The moment a client invites you into the thinking, not just the execution, is when trust has compounded into partnership.” 

Kartik Srinivasan, President for Auria made a similar point: the best partnerships are built on a shared commitment to delivering long-term value, where both sides invest in understanding each other’s goals, with a joint effort to solve real problems.

Regardless, every person I spoke to described the same behaviors: show up, follow through, be honest, stay invested through the messy middle and beyond. The family offices who navigate this well tend to have already accepted that friction is coming. They budget time for it, they give themselves and the vendor permission to iterate, and they go in knowing the solution on day one will look quite different by day 90.

For the relationships that succeed through the messy middle, a different question emerges: where to next?

Every family office has specific needs, but the vendor is building for a broader client base. When the product does not bend to a very specific use case, it is not a sign the relationship is broken. The healthiest relationships navigate that tension rather than letting it build up. 

One family member I spoke with was frank about it from both angles: treating every customer as a special snowflake is not good policy, but most established vendors are so slow to move that family offices do not even try giving feedback anymore.

So what does it look like when both sides get this right?

One family office manager described this as a key factor in his decision to change vendors. His previous vendor had been iterating, but not on things he valued. His new vendor actively wanted him to push on the roadmap, knowing they could roll those developments out to other clients. Both sides benefit: the family office gets a product that evolves toward their needs, and the vendor gets insight that makes the platform better for everyone.

George Wilson of ONDA sees this firsthand: each family office is unique, and their clients are the greatest sources of new reporting, analytics, and technology development capabilities. Ian Keates, CEO of Altoo, described a similar approach: "We are in regular contact with our clients and listening to their needs, often incorporating their ideas in the platform for the benefit of all of our clients."

But influence needs to flow the other way too. Ken Gamskjaer of Aleta: "The best vendor relationships are the ones where we show up and say 'have you thought about this?' We see how dozens of family offices solve the same problems. We should be the ones saying 'here is what we are seeing.'" Ashely Whittaker at FundCount made a related point: a vendor has implemented their software a hundred times. That experience is valuable, and being open to it, even when it challenges how you have always done things, can change the timeline, the cost, and the outcome of a project.

The healthiest relationships were the ones where neither side was too proud to be shaped by the other, with the family office bringing context and operational reality and the vendor bringing pattern recognition and perspective from working with dozens of other offices

Nobody I spoke to had a formula for this. They talked early about what each side needed, they made it safe to be honest when things were not working, and they kept checking whether the alignment was still there long after the contract was signed.

As Jay McNamara of Masttro put it: "In complex wealth environments, technology partnerships succeed when they are treated as operating relationships, not procurement events. That means shared accountability, early candour when something is off track, and sustained executive engagement after go-live."

And as one family member reminded me, none of the relationship language matters if the fundamentals are not there. Their perspective was simple: outputs, outputs, outputs. Are we getting the information we need, in the form we need it, on our screen, without having to fight for it?

If there is one thing I took away from all of these conversations, it is that the best partnerships are never the ones with the warmest language. They are the ones where both sides put in the work to understand what the other actually needs, and they keep at it long after the contract is signed.

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Jessica Parker is the founder of JP Advisory, where she works with family offices as their expert generalist, providing senior expertise and hands-on capacity to move critical work forward. She has seen family offices from three angles: as Group Financial Controller and Finance Lead for a single family office managing a complex global asset base, as an advisor in PwC's Family Office team, and as a solutions architect with a family office reporting platform helping family offices globally design and implement wealth platforms.