As 2025 unfolds, family offices and wealth owners in the UK find themselves at a defining juncture. On the one hand, the regulatory and economic landscape looks increasingly inhospitable. 9,500 millionaires left the country in 2024 alone, according to investment migration consultancy Henley & Partners.
On the other hand, the UK remains home to a relatively high proportion of generational capital locked in real estate. Wealthy UK family members may be more internationally mobile than ever, but often their holdings are not.
With governmental policies remaining largely outside their influence, what are family offices to do? The answer lies in focusing on what they can control: operational excellence. From laborious portfolio reconciliation to time-consuming reporting, digitalisation offers one of the clearest wins in this respect—especially as new advanced solutions can bring cutting-edge capabilities to even the most traditionally-minded family offices.
Greater expectations for deeper insights
The UK millionaire exodus mirrors a broader phenomenon in the free flow of information. While the wealthy have always sought international diversification, in today’s digital age it has become easier than ever for them to research investment and lifestyle options across borders.
For family offices, recognising this reality is key to success. They are no longer gatekeepers for data on asset prices and other basic wealth information now easily found online. Instead, they are expected to be trusted interpreters of this information. This focus on providing what machines cannot — personalised attention, bespoke advisory, and human judgement — represents a return to the fundamental purpose of a family office. The question is whether to navigate this return the hard way or the easy way.
Manual workflows–the rather tedious way to uncover and show data-driven insights
Despite the digital revolution, many UK family offices continue to rely on manual workflows that consume disproportionate time and introduce unnecessary risks. Relying on spreadsheets and slide decks is a familiar but increasingly problematic approach that no crucial insights or risks will slip through the cracks. This way, they can deliver a highly personal experience, knowing that technology is there to support – not replace – their role.
Typical manual workflows begin with staff logging into multiple portals to download data. This information is then painstakingly transferred to spreadsheets for reconciliation, categorisation, and analysis. Each manual entry brings the risk of human error that can distort financial pictures.
Even when data is accurately captured, spreadsheet-based systems present ongoing maintenance challenges. As portfolios evolve, spreadsheets require continuous modification. Formulas must be extended to new data ranges, and macros often break with slight changes to underlying structures.
Moreover, these manual efforts typically lead to presentation decks that may be inaccurate within a day or two. By the time family members review these materials — often after digging through email chains and/or scheduling portfolio review sessions — market conditions may have shifted substantially.
Manual workflows thus create a fundamental misalignment, with family members expecting on-demand access to accurate information, and family officers taking hours or days to address straightforward inquiries.
Automated workflows to the rescue
Modern wealth management platforms designed for family offices offer sophisticated automation that transforms how financial information flows from institutions to decision-makers. Rather than manually gathering data, these platforms establish secure connections directly to banking and investment platforms, automatically retrieving and normalising asset data.
This integration eliminates rather tedious data entry and human error, with automated calculations running continuously as new data arrives to provide near real-time insights. When family members have questions, answers are immediately available through intuitive dashboards.
Returns on investments in such platforms materialise quickly in the form of time saved on manual data processing. For example, with the Altoo Wealth Platform, one family office reported freeing up around 18 hours of team time every month to spend on strategic advisory and other higher-impact activities.
For wealth owners, the benefits are equally compelling. They can access current information whenever questions arise, enabling more informed and timely decisions.
Ready to dive into the report and discover more about Altoo’s showcase? You can read and download the report online here.
SaaS: overcoming traditional hesitations to digital transformation
Despite the promise of digitally-automated workflows, many UK family offices have kept calm and carried on with manual approaches. Typical factors behind this reluctance to innovate include:
Supposedly high costs
The UK features a higher proportion of single-family offices (SFOs) compared to multi-family structures predominant in newer wealth hubs. These SFOs typically have lean teams with limited IT expertise, and technology investments often appear daunting.
Legacy systems that are not quite painful enough to change (yet). Many UK family offices evolved from family businesses or banking relationships that have functioned well enough for years. Moving away from tried-and-true processes is always a risk, especially if it involves significant upfront investment and an unclear path to success.
The emergence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) wealth management platforms like Altoo’s has altered the technology equation for family offices. Offering sophisticated capabilities through subscription models that scale with usage, these cloud-based solutions can automate the bulk of a family office’s tedious workflows:
- Within a matter of weeks;
- With upfront costs brought to a minimum;
- And, without ongoing maintenance headaches, as updates and new features deploy automatically to meet emerging requirements.
The Altoo Wealth Platform: a proper digital ally for UK family offices
The Altoo Wealth Platform is designed to address the unique challenges facing UK family offices today. Built, hosted, and managed exclusively in Switzerland—a country long recognised for its world-leading privacy regulations—the SaaS platform features highly secure data connections to all institutions in the UK and abroad where families hold their bankable assets.
Through these connections, current data on asset prices and transactions flows automatically into the platform for automated analysis, reconciliation, and visualisation, in intuitive dashboards displaying performance at the portfolio and as set levels.
Additionally, the platform’s comprehensive coverage extends to less liquid assets like private equity and real estate that are commonplace in the portfolios of wealthy UK families. In addition to property values, maintenance costs, renovation expenditures, and rental income can all be tracked to create a holistic, easily understandable view of real estate performance.
For family office professionals, the platform offers a cost-effective and efficient way to redirect expertise away from tedious data entry work and towards providing the personalised advisory services that wealth owners truly value.
And for internationally mobile families maintaining UK-based assets, the platform makes it easy to review consolidated, up-to-date positions from anywhere in the world without cumbersome spreadsheets and slide decks. Built-in digital messaging channels eliminate the need to communicate via email or other less secure channels.
Takeaway
As UK family offices seek to make the most of what appear to be uncertain and challenging times, digital capabilities represent not just operational improvements but strategic advantages. Those who build these capabilities will position themselves to mind the gap between heightened digital expectations and service delivery, providing the personalised attention that reminds wealth owners why family offices remain indispensable in the digital age.
The road to gaining these capabilities need not be arduous — taking the Altoo Wealth Platform for a test drive offers a glimpse into how smooth it can be.
Interested in reading the UK Toolkit 2025? You can read and download the report online here.
About the UK Toolkit 2025
The UK Toolkit 2025 report examines the shape of wealth management in the UK today, and how industry participants are responding to the challenges and opportunities of this market. It features 14 articles contributed by a range of industry participants — including wealth managers, vendors, and consultants focused on financial services. It also showcases eight technology offerings relevant to the wealth management industry in the United Kingdom.
Our broader Toolkit Report Series covers thematic, geography and wealth manager segment-focused reports, each tasked with delving into the topics and supporting technologies of relevance to help wealth managers of all types better understand how they should bring technology into their business and in which areas.
Following this third report, focused on the UK, we are publishing:
- US RIA Toolkit – discover more here
About The Wealth Mosaic
The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.
For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers and knowledge resources by specific business needs.
For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.
For more information, visit: www.thewealthmosaic.com
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