From left to right, Trump Royale, Trump Palace and Trump International Seaside Station are presented in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, the United States on March 13, 2017.
Joe Skipper | Reuters
According to Deloitte, the rich, families have exploded in popularity, 8,000 in the world and to the management of 3.1 billions of dollars in assets, according to Deloitte. Events and conferences adapted to the family office followed.
According to Dakota Marketplace, a research company for Dakota Marketplace, a research company for investment sales professionals.
“People are interested in this world because it grows so fast, and it is a capital basin,” said Paul Carbone, co-founder and vice-president of Pritzker Private Capital and member of the steering committee for an initiative of Family office at the business school at the University of Chicago. The initiative welcomes rallies for family offices and said it was in demand for an increase.
“One of the things that was clear was that families wanted to have a dialogue between them, where there are shared experiences, shared challenges, shared opportunities, where they can compare notes,” said Carbon.
Carbon divides these events into four categories: commercial conferences, events sponsored by large institutions such as banks, gatherings organized by families and academic family meetings.
“There are thousands of dollars in family space, and it goes relatively little directly in the world of private capital,” he added. “If capital users can use this considerable capital group, it can offer them and enjoy them.”
Raphael “Raffi” Amit, professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, witnessed the momentum of the first hand. The Wharton Global Family Alliance, founded and led by Amit, has hosted family gatherings for more than two decades.
Wharton rallies are intimate, crowned with 60 participants from family offices and not sponsored. But the share of the lion of family conferences is dominated by sponsors and sellers, he said.
“Families hate – according to our investigation – when they go to these conferences and all these sellers bombed them with all kinds of offers,” said Amit. “We organize it for families, by families, and therefore the content is very, very different.”
All the same, the sponsors of events are impatient to attract the attention of this elite clientele.
This week marked the return of Anthony Ritossa, a well-known figure in the circles of the European family office and the Middle East. The former seller of hedge funds was at the origin of the 24th annual summit of the world investment of the Family Office in Miami, a two -day bash from February 18 to 19 at the Trump International Beach Resort.
Ritossa, which, for many years, has gone through “Sir Anthony”, built a name for conference accommodation for family offices and investors wishing to court them. He has since abandoned the “Monsieur” and has been the subject of a one -year investigation and an article of 2022 by Vanity Fair, which raised questions on the legitimacy of his references and commercial practices.
Vanity Fair, quoting the former participants of the conferences, reported that Ritossa had distorted its history and billed sponsors between $ 18,000 and $ 200,000 in the hope of disembarking from family investments that have rarely materialized.
Ritossa described Vanity Fair’s report as “inaccurate” but refused to comment CNBC on all the details. When he was contacted to comment by CNBC, he repeatedly offered invitations to the Miami conference with a ticket “provided free” to “experiment with it first”, that CNBC did not accept .
After the article by Vanity Fair, Ritossa welcomed another family summit in February 2023, then fell largely from the spotlight. He sold one of his limited liability companies to Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, according to the president of the American Think Tank, Lakshmi Narayanan.
Ritossa did not answer CNBC questions on the sale of his business.
His last Summit series started in Dubai with events in October and December 2024 exceeded an anchor for CNBC Arabia, based in Dubai, a CNBC licensee which operates the Arabic language information channel. Participants included Sheikhs and the CEO of the Raffles family office, Chi-Man Kwan.
The impression, at least on the surface, is that Ritossa has gone up.
The invitation to the Miami event declared that the summit would bring together coterie of more than 250 people with high shuttle, families, members of the Middle East royalty and others, representing more than 1 Billion of Dollars of investable assets. The list of 148 speakers and honored guests included directors and family staff, but was a largely disparate cohort, with speakers representing various industries, from crypto to medical tourism. The mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, was interviewed for a conversation by the fire.
For some participants, the reputation of the conference guests, not the hosts, is the most important.
“Within the family of families, events are more on which families present themselves than who organized it,” said Jonathan Zaback, co-founder of the Public Relations Society Impact Partners, who represents several speakers at the summit . “People still attend because of whom they know will be there. Families go where they feel that they will meet other people and friends. For some, these events are one of the few times a year that they can be seen. ”