Single vs Multi: Choosing Your Family Office

By Maheshvasan, CFP, CTEP

The first structural decision on the road to a family office in India

Last month we established why the family office has become unavoidable for serious Indian wealth. This month, the harder question, the one that actually costs money if you get it wrong: do you build your own, or share one?

It sounds like a simple fork in the road, but it is not. Build a Single-Family Office (SFO) too early, and you are paying corporate salaries to manage a portfolio a good advisor could have handled. Stay in a Multi Family Office (MFO) too long, and you quietly outgrow the attention, the customisation and the one most families underestimate the confidentiality you actually need. Same decision, opposite mistakes.

First, the numbers, because this is no longer a niche

A decade ago, a “family office” in India was something you read about in American books. Not anymore. According to PwC, India had just 45 structured family offices in 2018; by 2024 the count had crossed 300, managing over US$30 billion, a sevenfold jump in six years, and the curve is still climbing as Indian promoters monetise.

The global picture explains why. Deloitte estimates there are over 8,000 single family offices worldwide, projected to cross 10,700 by 2030, with assets under management rising from about US$3.1 trillion towards US$5.4 trillion. Asia Pacific has already overtaken Europe in the number of family offices and with India’s ultrawealthy population projected by Knight Frank to grow over 50 per cent by 2028, a meaningful share of that Asian growth will carry an Indian surname.

So the question is not whether Indian families will build family offices. They are building them at speed. The question is whether your family should build one alone or share one.

What does each model actually mean?

A Single-Family Office is a dedicated team housed in an LLP, a private limited company, or simply built around the family’s existing NBFC or holding entity that works exclusively for one family. Every employee, every system and every process serves a single balance sheet. The family bears the entire cost and, in exchange, gets total alignment, total confidentiality and total control.

A Multi Family Office is a professional firm that delivers family office services consolidated reporting, investment advisory and execution, tax and estate coordination, succession support to several families at once. Costs are shared, talent is pooled, and each family buys a slice of an institutional platform rather than building one.

And then there is the model the global textbooks rarely describe — the Indian hybrid: a lean inhouse team of three to six people handling accounts, compliance and execution, supported by an external family office advisor who brings the investment process, dashboards and strategic oversight. Several of the offices I work with run exactly this way the family owns the spine, and rents the brain it does not yet need fulltime. For many Indian families in the ₹100–500 crore band, this hybrid is the honest answer.

Global thresholds, Indian translation

The global wealth industry answers the SFO Vs MFO question with a dollar rule of thumb: a dedicated office starts making sense somewhere north of US$100 million of investable wealth, but India needs a more nuanced translation, because Indian family wealth behaves differently. It is more real estate heavy, more entangled with the operating business, more multigenerational in its living arrangements, and far more private. From my own practice, the Indian bands look like this:

Below ₹50 crores of investable wealth, a family office is a label, not a structure. What the family needs is a first-class advisor, a consolidated reporting system, and disciplined estate planning. An MFO or a fee-based advisor serves this well.

Between ₹50 and ₹250 crores, the MFO or hybrid model is usually optimal. The wealth is large enough to need policy, consolidation and multi entity structuring, but not large enough to absorb ₹1.5–2.5 crores a year of fixed establishment cost without the cost itself becoming a drag on returns.

Between ₹250 and ₹500 crores, the decision genuinely turns on complexity rather than corpus. A family with one pool of liquid wealth and simple holdings can stay with an MFO comfortably. A family with an operating business, properties across cities, charitable trusts and members across jurisdictions will feel the pull towards a dedicated team — because coordination itself becomes a fulltime job.

Above ₹500 crores, an SFO almost always justifies itself. At ₹1,000 crores, even a well-staffed office costing ₹3–4 crores a year is 30–40 basis points, comparable to what the family would pay an MFO, but with undivided attention.

Corpus, however, is only the first filter. Deciding on corpus alone is judging the book by its cover. Stan Lee wrote, “with great power there must also come great responsibility” and your author will add: with more money there comes more complexity.

We approach to solve the abovementioned problem with four tests.

The complexity test. Count the entities, not just the crores. Individuals, HUFs, partnership firms, private trusts, an NBFC, charitable trusts, LLPs holding property every entity multiplies compliance, and compliance is the true workload of an Indian family office. A ₹150 crore family with eleven entities may need more inhouse capability than a ₹400 crore family with two.

The involvement test. Some patriarchs (let us be honest — most) and nextgen members want to sit in every investment committee meeting and approve every transaction; others want a quarterly dashboard and their evenings free. High involvement families extract full value from an SFO. Delegating families are often better served and better disciplined by an MFO’s institutional process.

The privacy test. For many Indian business families, the decisive argument for an SFO is not economics at all. It is that no outsider not even a trusted MFO should see the whole picture: the full asset list, the family arrangements, the loans between branches, the settlement being negotiated with a brother. If, confidentiality of the complete balance sheet is non-negotiable, the family will end up building inhouse regardless of cost. Better to acknowledge this early and design a lean SFO than to pretend otherwise.

The succession test. If the next generation is entering wealth stewardship or conspicuously exiting the operating business, a family office doubles as their training ground and their governance guardrail. An SFO gives them a platform; a good MFO gives them mentorship and comparison with how other families do it. Which of the two your rising generation needs more is a question worth answering honestly.

Who suits what: a practitioner’s summary

The SFO suits the family whose wealth is large (₹250–500 crores upwards), whose affairs are complex and multi entity, whose members are actively involved, and whose privacy requirements are absolute. It particularly suits post exit promoters who have sold a business and now, in effect, want to run their capital as their next enterprise.

The MFO suits the first-generation wealthy, professional families, families in the ₹50–250 crore band, NRI families needing India side execution, and importantly families in transition, who use the MFO years to learn what a family office does before deciding to build their own.

The hybrid suits the very large Indian middle: families who want ownership of their books and their people, but institutional quality in investment process and reporting. It is also the natural migration path many of today’s best SFOs began life as three accountants and an external advisor.

From choosing the model to building the machine

Once the model is chosen, the next task is to design the machine itself the verticals, roles and reporting lines that make a family office actually run.

Global family office literature will tell you an office should cover investment management, wealth planning, administration, philanthropy and lifestyle services. True but also unhelpful, because it describes the menu, not the kitchen. What a family sitting in Chennai, Surat or Nasik actually needs is an organisational chart: who reports to whom, who does what every month, and how the work of managing several hundred crores gets divided among five to eight real human beings.

Over the years we have evolved a structure that answers exactly that. It consists of one apex role — the Chief Family Officer and five verticals, and a set of monthly rhythms that keep the whole machine honest.

The apex: the Chief Family Officer

At the top sits the Chief Family Officer, the single point of accountability between the family and the office. In larger offices this is a hired professional; in leaner ones the role is held by the patriarch or a senior nextgen member, supported by an external advisor. The Chief Family Officer chairs the operating rhythm, owns the relationship with the Investment Committee, and ensures that every vertical produces its dashboard every month. One person must own the whole — otherwise the office fragments back into the very silos it was built to eliminate.

The unglamorous foundation: Finance

This is the heaviest vertical, because Indian family wealth lives across many entities — individuals, HUFs, firms, trusts, sometimes an NBFC. It carries three functions.

• Bookkeeping maintains the accounts of every family entity and every investment, records all bank transactions, tracks direct and indirect taxes, plans family cash flows, and maintains the consolidated MIS and accounts dashboard. This is where the family’s true net worth becomes a known, current number rather than an estimate.
• Returns and compliance handles all direct and indirect tax filings and the entity level regulatory calendar including, where the family holds an NBFC as its investment vehicle, the RBI’s annual filings. The compliance calendar of a multi entity Indian family easily runs past a hundred events a year; missing them is how families end up meeting the tax department.
• Audit and taxation conducts internal audit of transactions, manages assessments and scrutiny, and supports the structuring of investments from the taxation side ensuring the tax lens is applied before an investment is made, not after.

The engine room: Investments

• Operations coordinates with the Investment Committee for review meetings, maintains the MIS of transactions and holdings, and executes investment transactions across advisors and across products. Execution discipline — money moving on time, folios reconciled, capital calls honoured — is worth more than most families realise.
• Review maintains the investment dashboard for the monthly review and supports the evaluation of real estate and private investments. The dashboard is the family’s single source of truth: every asset, every entity, one page.
• Structuring covers the legal side — which entity should hold which investment, review of contracts, legal opinions on real estate and deal structures, and the compliance of investments with both regulation and the family’s own Investment Policy Statement.

The elephant in the room: Real Estate

Global frameworks treat property as one more asset class. For us it is far more tangible, status driven, tied to identity, and close to the heart. This is true not only for family offices but for almost every Indian investor: real estate makes up the largest slice of most families’ net worth. The vertical revolves around three things — transactions, maintenance and administration and in practice it behaves less like a vertical and more like a family office within the family office.

The test is simple: a family office that cannot produce, on demand, a one-page register of every property with its title status and current value is not yet doing its job.

The conscience: Endowment and Charity

Indian families give generously and administer that giving poorly. A dedicated vertical changes that. Operations completes donation transactions and the associated 80G / 12A / FCRA adjacent paperwork; Review identifies credible beneficiaries aligned to the family’s charitable objectives and maintains the MIS of all giving; and PR and fundraise manages the family’s public philanthropic identity and, where the family runs its own foundation, cultivates co donors and partners. Structured philanthropy is also the single best training ground for the next generation — real decisions, real money, lower stakes.

The people: HR, Admin and IT

The support vertical handles compensation and benefits for office and household staff, training and development, employee related compliance, and increasingly critical the technology stack. A modern Indian family office runs on a consolidation platform into which every transaction across every entity is posted monthly and reconciled against bank statements. Cybersecurity, access control and data room discipline belong here too: the family office holds the most sensitive information the family possesses.

The operating rhythm

A vital point that is easy to miss: the verticals are functions, not headcount. In a rightsized Indian office, one senior accounts professional may own bookkeeping oversight, compliance filings and audit; a second executes daily posting and reconciliation; an investments lead owns operations, review and structuring support; a junior analyst posts investment transactions and reconciles PMS bank books; a real-estate coordinator manages property; and an external advisor prepares the monthly holdings review, supports the Investment Committee, and brings market intelligence. Six people, five verticals, complete coverage.

And every role must be written down a one-page role sheet per person, listing exactly which dashboards and filings they own so that the office survives any individual’s exit. An office that lives in one employee’s head has simply swapped the promoter’s brain for someone else’s. The whole point was to get the wealth out of a single head and onto paper.

The mistake to avoid

The machine, of course, is only as good as its operators. The most common error I see is families choosing the structure for status rather than for function building “our family office” with a nameplate, but no policy, no dashboard and no defined roles. The label without the framework delivers the cost of an SFO with the discipline of neither model.

Choose the structure the way you would design a plant: size it to the throughput. The throughput of a family office is not crores under management; it is transactions, entities, compliance events and decisions per year. Measure those honestly, and the SFO Vs MFO answer usually becomes obvious.

One caution before you copy anyone’s answer, including mine. The framework tells you which questions to ask; only your family’s answers can fill it in. Every family office worth the name is tailormade, the bands and tests above are the measuring tape, not the suit.

When these rhythms run with at most efficiency, the family office stops being a project and becomes an institution. Most families reach a functioning office in twelve to eighteen months following this sequence, at a cost that grows with proven need rather than ambition.

People and money, however, only execute decisions. What governs the decisions themselves, who in the family decides what, and by what rules. It is the family constitution. That is where we go next. Our next read is all about the Family Constitution.

Maheshvasan, CFP, CTEP

Maheshvasan is a former banker with over 19 years of experience in Indian banking and wealth management. He is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Chartered Trust and Estate Planner (CTEP) and a certified Independent Director, and currently structures and manages family offices for Indian business families.