Wharton Global Family Alliance and IESE Business School Announce Single Family Office Survey Results
Research into Single Family Offices--Organizations that Manage Personal Fortunes, Lives of Wealthy Families--Reveals Insights into Governance, Investment Focus and Geographic Differences

PHILADELPHIA, PA, BARCELONA, May 15, 2008 -- The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the IESE Business School, based in Spain, announced that the Wharton Global Family Alliance (Wharton GFA) has completed a survey of the landscape of Single Family Office (SFO), believed to be the largest and most diverse of its kind ever completed in the SFO space. SFOs are professional organizations who attend to wealth management and personal services for wealthy families. The survey analyzes SFOs that manage at least US $100 million in investable assets with about half of the participants managing more than $1 billion in such global locations as Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Some of the survey’s findings include:

• Most families view their SFO as mainly a private investment office. “Soft” responsibilities, like coordinating education, providing concierge services, and organizing philanthropy, are considered significantly less important SFO tasks.
• The majority of the families participating in our study are entrepreneurial. In most cases, families with SFOs are majority shareholders in their family’s business operations and are intimately involved in the family business.
• Families are deeply involved in the operations of their SFO, and in nearly half of the offices studied, a family member acts as the head of the SFO
• SFOs in the Americas more often recommend equity investments compared to those in Europe which suggest real estate.

“The importance of our study is that it documents for the first time how wealthy families manage their private affairs,” said Prof. Raphael (Raffi) Amit, Chairman of the Wharton GFA Executive Committee. “By joining forces with a network of strong research partners such as IESE, we gained both depth and breadth: our data represents a significant sample size, offering intimate glimpses into how SFOs are structured and governed ”

The survey is a joint project of longtime Wharton GFA partners IESE Business School of Spain. Besides Prof. Amit authors on the study are Heinrich Liechtenstein of IESE Business School; Prof. M. Julia Prats also of IESE and Todd Millay & Laird P. Pendleton of the CCC Alliance, LLC.

“This research is truly global in scope,” said Professor Liechtenstein of IESE. “In places like Europe, Latin America and Asia, family firms drive local economies. One of our foremost goals was to better understand Single Family Offices in a regional context and this survey helps close that knowledge gap.”

Wharton Global Family Alliance research papers, case studies and other materials, are available on the Wharton GFA website .

About the Wharton Global Family Alliance and the Wharton School
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania -- founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school -- is recognized globally for intellectual leadership and ongoing innovation across every major discipline of business education. The most comprehensive source of business knowledge in the world, Wharton bridges research and practice through its broad engagement with the global business community. The school has more than 4,600 undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral students; more than 10,000 annual participants in executive education programs; and an alumni network of more than 82,000 graduates.
The Wharton Global Family Alliance develops in-depth academic research focused on family businesses, primarily in the areas of governance, philanthropy, and wealth management. We focus our rigorous scholarly research in combination with the practical experience of successful global families to highlight the social impact of families worldwide. Wharton GFA has a robust research agenda and a wide variety of outreach focused on a global audience. Since its formation in January 2004 through an agreement between the Wharton School and CCC Alliance, the Wharton GFA has rapidly become the premier knowledge leader in family business research in the areas of wealth management, philanthropy, and family business governance.

About IESE Business School
IESE is one of the world’s top 10 business schools, having pioneered executive education in Europe when it was founded in 1958 in Barcelona. In 1964, it began offering Europe’s first full-time MBA,and subsequently, the world’s first bilingual program in English and Spanish. There are more than 30,000 IESE alumni working in more than 100 countries around the world.  The school is one of the world’s most prolific producers of business cases, many of them focused on family firms.

IESE is a leader in Europe in the area of family business education and research. IESE launched the first Family Business Chair in Europe in 1987. The chair disseminates research, as well as organizes numerous international conferences and seminars every year. Specific areas of investigation include family business governance, ethics and corporate responsibility in family businesses and capital structure and finance in family businesses.

The school also hosts the International Conference on Family Business at its Barcelona campus each year. The event draws leading scholars and business leaders together to discuss the latest developments affecting family businesses all over the world.

Within its MBA program, IESE offers a course on family businesses, which examines the key challenges of family-owned firms, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as their evolution and development.

The school disseminates its research through its online portal, IESE Insight, and its publishing arm, IESE Publishing.