Callan Family Office was founded by banking and wealth management professionals with significant experience and valuable perspectives around the fact that wealth is both complex and personal. Driven by a desire to elevate client experience and service, they’ve carefully built an independent firm that uniquely serves the needs of ultra high net worth clients, foundations and endowments. They share their learnings with us here.

What opportunity did you see to differentiate Callan Family Office to ultra high net worth families, foundations and endowments?

This client segment continues to be not only rapidly growing, but also evolving at an intense pace – and that alone presents an opportunity for a new entrant like Callan Family Office to come to the market with a better way to deliver guidance. 

Our clients require more active and involved investment management, more complex financial planning and counsel, holistic reporting, custody and philanthropic consulting services. This is not just about solving for complex risks, as the profile of our clients allows for a different set of investment opportunities that can help meet their individualized objectives. 

How have your clients’ goals evolved over time and how are you uniquely addressing those needs?

Our vision is to bring institutional-quality experience to a highly selective community of clients. Our team’s deep experience, together with strategic business and technology partners, uniquely positions our firm to address client goals. 

We are also united behind shared values that are a foundational pillar for us. We employ a decision-making process that relies on our own internal expertise and access to specialists across the industry for various services. While more intensive, this approach generally leads to better results and peace of mind for our clients.  

Tell us about the technology and tools you use to deliver optimal guidance and highly personalized service.

Because we had the advantage of starting with a clean slate – without having to worry about legacy technology or systems – we created a new open architecture approach based on the select group of clients we chose to serve. As a result, we have several key partners that help maximize our impact. 

On the investment front, our partnership with Callan LLC allows us to bring the breadth of investment resources often reserved for large institutional investment clients to our wealth management clients. Their investment research and manager access allows our investment professionals to build customized portfolios that meet the needs of our clients.

Schwab Family Office continues to be a valuable partner in providing custodial, reporting and banking services for our clients. Our team works closely with them in providing the daily service and support our clients need. 

On the technology side, Addepar has been an invaluable partner in providing our clients with interactive reporting. We can aggregate assets across portfolios, analyze, visualize and slice data, personalize reports and deliver the information via an online portal with mobile access. By partnering with Addepar, we have been able to make more informed and efficient decisions when it comes to the asset allocation, investment management, and estate and financial planning advice and strategies we provide our clients. 

Why is innovative technology essential to serving Callan’s complex client base?

At our core, we embrace complexity. Our client segment often has balance sheets comprising diverse public and private assets accumulated through generations. Their directly owned assets, such as a one-off private real estate or venture capital investment, can proliferate over time and create additional challenges. Still our clients want to see their investments holistically, and with an easy-to-use interface, along with metrics that provide an in-depth understanding of their asset allocation and results. Addepar helps us solve this need.

We also use an integration with Fabric to help manage risk and implement changes that optimize the overall risk/return profile of the client’s holistic wealth picture. Because Fabric is integrated with Addepar’s reporting, it helps us, and our clients, understand risk at a much deeper level comparable to an x-ray of investment risk, as opposed to a surface-level examination. This focus on factor risk is powerful and leads to much more precise portfolio decisions that benefit our clients. 

More broadly, as technology continues to improve and quickly evolve, our flexible structure allows us to utilize and embrace new tools. Our innovative tech stack will be foundational to our success.