Show Notes
While there are no shortage of providers seeking to sell or advise families on the management of their wealth, far fewer are fiduciaries with a business model built to align the firm’s interest with the clients. “Everyone is our competition, and no one is our competition,”
WE Family Offices CEO Mel Lagomasino tells
Rosemont CEO Chas Burkhart in this episode of Rosemont’s
Global Investment Leaders podcast.
This alignment between the firm and the families it serves is the key to WE Family Offices’ success, Lagomasino explains. “Our success is based on whether we’re helping our families be successful in what they are trying to accomplish. It’s our very singular fiduciary focus.”
Drawing on her impressive career as CEO of JP Morgan Private Bank and CEO of GenSpring Family Offices prior to co-founding WE Family Offices, Lagomasino shares her insights on serving families in a way that puts their interest first, including:
- Lagomasino’s personal connection to helping international families protect and sustain their wealth over generations and how that personal mission contributed to her co-founding WE Family Offices
- What makes WE Family Offices’ business model unique and how the firm’s total alignment with the clients they serve makes them “missionaries not mercenaries”
- How the firm first helps a family identify their values and then invest in a way that expresses those values, whether the focus be climate, gender, education, or negative screening to avoid fossil fuels, all without compromising returns
- How those who invest through a values-lens are often more engaged with their portfolios
Amid the wave of M&A activity in the family office industry, WE Family Offices has remained steadfast in its focus on helping multi-generational families sustain their wealth by sustaining its employee ownership structure and ensuring a path for future firm leadership. Part of the future also includes recruiting and retaining a diverse team. As firms try to recruit more female talent, she finds it important for other up-and-coming female leaders to see themselves represented at the firm. “It’s about being your authentic self,” she says.