1. Could you provide a brief introduction to your business?
The Trusted Family platform is designed to be the full operating system (familyOS) 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.

Trusted Family was founded in 2007 by two next-generation family business leaders, Edouard Thijssen and Edouard Janssen, from the Belgian Aliaxis and Solvay families, as a solution to their own problem. Their families were growing, and the tools they had – email, SharePoint, and occasional gatherings – simply weren't designed to keep the family informed, aligned, and equipped to support the increasingly professional operation of family councils, boards, and committees.

So they built something that was. What began as a private platform for two families has grown, over nearly two decades, into the platform that more than 200 of the world's leading family businesses and family offices rely on across 35 countries.

That origin matters, because it shapes everything we do. We were built by families for families, not as enterprise software adapted for a niche.

More recently, our focus has shifted to becoming the full operating system for enterprising families, going beyond family engagement. Encrypted vaults, dedicated workspaces, granular access rights, structured meeting workflows, task management, and viewer tracking replace the patchwork of emails, shared drives, and spreadsheets that were never designed for governance.

And within the next few weeks, we’ll bring the connected picture of ownership and wealth into one place: a live shareholder register that turns succession into a structured process rather than a scramble, real asset and property management, and integrations with the tools families already rely on, such as Addepar.

The principle is the same one we started with in 2007: bring everything a family needs to run the enterprise into one secure place, instead of leaving it scattered across a dozen disconnected tools.

3. Why do your existing and target clients choose to work with you? What makes your solutions relevant and distinct from your competitors?
The families we work with almost never come to us with a technology problem. They come with a trust problem. A decision gets made in one branch and the other branch hears about it too late. A board pack goes out over email and no one knows who actually opened it. A succession comes up and the full ownership picture turns out to live in a couple of people's heads and a spreadsheet from 2019.

So when a family asks us, "why you?", they are not really asking which platform has the longest feature list. They are asking which one holds the family together as it gets more complicated. Here is how I answer that.

First, we were built by families, for families. Trusted Family was started by next-generation family business leaders who were living these exact problems, and that genuinely shapes how we build. Everything is designed around how a family actually works, across branches and generations, and people tend to feel that in the first 10 minutes. It does not feel like enterprise software repackaged for family offices, because it isn't.

Second, we pull the whole thing into one highly secure place. Most families arrive with communication on WhatsApp, board meetings on email and PDF, and governance living wherever it lands. familyOS brings it together: the everyday side with workspaces and a living family tree; proper meeting and assembly management with agendas, minutes, and decisions that are actually written down; task tracking; secure vaults; and the ability to see who has really seen what. It connects to the tools families already use, and in the next few weeks it will go further into ownership itself, with a live shareholder register, a booking system for shared property, and an Addepar integration. One connected view instead of 10 tools that never line up.

Third – and this is the part I think matters most – a platform on its own does not change how a family makes decisions. People do. So, every client works with a dedicated success team that helps them put governance into practice, from onboarding through each new generation coming on board. We want to be a partner in doing the actual work, not a login we hand over and hope for the best.

Fourth is the community, which is genuinely hard to find anywhere else. Every client gets full access to it: our in-person conferences, the community platform, and TF Connect, where families learn directly from each other. The people we serve are wrestling with questions almost no one around them understands, and the community means they are not doing it alone. It is one of the biggest reasons families stay with us for decades rather than a year or two.

Underneath all of it, there is one line we do not cross. We build for enterprising families and no one else. Everything, the product, the success team, the community, is shaped around what makes these families different: they span generations, privacy is not negotiable, and they think in decades, not quarters. That is why families trust us with their most sensitive information, and why they stay.

4. What's next for your business? Can you share the firm's current focus and future plans, such as product development, market expansion, and strategic goals?
This year, we are launching a few new dimensions to our operating system for enterprising families (familyOS). Practically, that means going beyond communication and governance into the connected financial picture of the family!The first is ownership and assets. We're adding two capabilities natively to the platform: a live shareholder register and real asset and property management. And, through our new Addepar integration, portfolio data and family context can finally sit side by side in a world where financial performance and family governance rarely live in the same place. The result: ownership, wealth, and governance in one connected view, instead of separate silos that never quite reconcile.

The second major development is our new Education Module. Continuity in family enterprises is measured in decades, and one of the greatest challenges is ensuring that future owners, successors, and family members are well prepared for their roles. Whether joining a family council, serving on a board, or participating in other governance bodies, education is essential. That's why we're building, together with our clients and trusted partners, an Education Module that lives directly within the Trusted Family platform. Families will be able to create their own tailored learning journeys, while also accessing high-quality content from leading external experts. The goal is to better prepare both current and future owners, while streamlining the onboarding and continuous development of family members throughout their governance journey.

5. Based on your experience in the wealth management sector, what key opportunities and challenges do you foresee for firms today and in the next three years?
The single force shaping the next few years is the largest wealth transfer in history. In the US alone, roughly US$124 trillion will change hands over the next two decades, and Europe is running its own version of the same handover. What makes it matter is not the size of the number, it is what actually determines the outcome. A transfer that big rises or falls on the quality of a family's decisions, not on its returns, and on whether the next generation is ready to make them.

Sitting underneath that is a governance gap most of the industry still underestimates. Study after study lands on the same figures: around 70 percent of wealthy families lose the wealth by the second generation, and 90 percent by the third. When you dig into those cases, the cause is almost never a bad portfolio. It is a breakdown in how the family communicates and governs itself.

The data backs it up. Fewer than half of family offices have a formal governance framework with board-level oversight, and J.P. Morgan's 2026 survey found that 86 percent have no clear succession plan for their key decision-makers. The intent is nearly universal. The structures to deliver on it are rare.

That gap is the opportunity. For a long time, firms competed on investment performance, and that will always matter. But performance is increasingly table stakes, and it is not what holds a family together across generations. The firms and advisors who win the next decade are the ones moving upstream into governance and succession, helping families build the structures that make good decisions repeatable. The ones who stay purely investment-focused will watch that part of their value commoditise around them.

Two shifts will speed all of it up. The first is the next generation. They expect the enterprise to run digitally, with the right information and the full decision history in one place, not in a binder and a quarterly PDF. They are the ones pushing families to take technology seriously. The second is trust and data. As families and their assets spread across more jurisdictions, cybersecurity and cross-border oversight stop being an IT concern and become a governance one.

If I had to put it in one line: the priority for the next three years is to build the decision-making structure while things are calm, because nobody makes their best call in the middle of a 20 percent drawdown. The families – and the firms serving them – who treat governance and technology as core infrastructure, rather than an afterthought, are already pulling ahead. That gap will only widen.

About Trusted Family
Trusted Family is the world’s leading governance platform for family businesses and family offices, designed to secure sensitive information, streamline communication, and facilitate decision-making. Beyond technology, we empower 200-plus families with data-driven insights, expert knowledge, and access to an exclusive community of international, like-minded peers, connecting virtually and in person.

Our integrated approach fosters unity, transparency, and long-term success while safeguarding family legacies. Fully independent, Trusted Family was founded and remains owned by family business leaders.

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