Insights · Family offices
What a family office does,
and which Saudi families need one
The Kingdom's largest fortunes are run like institutions: a written policy, one balance sheet and a person accountable for both. The same discipline is available to a family long before it can justify a payroll.
In brief
- A family office is a business with one client. Its three jobs are to plan the family's balance sheet, to invest it against a written policy, and to govern how decisions are taken across generations.
- The institution is costly because it is mostly people. UBS puts the pure running cost at 41.1 basis points of assets, with staff two thirds of it; the offices Deloitte surveyed averaged USD 2.0 billion under management and 15 staff.
- Saudi family wealth tends to sit in property, the family business and Tadawul, all answering to one economy. The Kingdom's own institutions show the alternative: PIF holds 76% at home by mandate, because its job is to build the economy; ADIA, whose job is to preserve capital for generations, holds nothing at home by policy.
- The value sits in the function: one balance sheet, an Investor Policy Statement, an allocation built against it, and a review cadence, all of which a Shariah-compliant mandate can accommodate.
- A family does not need to hire a staff of fifteen to get this. It needs specialised advisory, licensed in the Kingdom, that delivers the function without the institution.
The definition
An office with one client
Remove the mystique and a family office is a modest thing: a small business whose only customer is a family, and whose product is the orderly running of that family's wealth.
Every merchant family of scale has had one in some form, whether or not it used the word. Someone kept the ledger of the properties, the trading company and the land. Someone decided how surplus capital should be placed. Someone made sure the decisions were taken by the right people, in the right order, and would hold after the founder was gone.
Modern offices add a great deal around those three jobs. The three jobs remain the whole of the point.
Plan
A living balance sheet: every entity, account, property and commitment with a date attached, across the Kingdom and abroad, in one base currency and kept current rather than rebuilt in a crisis.
Invest
An allocation derived from the family's objectives, constraints and Shariah requirements, written down as policy and then implemented and rebalanced against that policy rather than against the market's mood.
Govern
Decision rights across a wide family, a review cadence, a family council or investment committee where the family is large enough, and a plan for how the office carries on after the patriarch.
The economics
Why it was an institution for the very few
A family office is expensive because it is a payroll before it is anything else.
UBS surveyed 317 family offices in 2025; the average participating family was worth USD 2.7 billion and its office managed USD 1.1 billion. Across that group the pure cost of running the office was 41.1 basis points of assets in 2024, and staff took two thirds of it. Offices above USD 1 billion benefited from scale at 35.1 basis points, which implies that smaller offices pay proportionally more.
Deloitte counts 8,030 single-family offices worldwide managing USD 3.1 trillion; those it surveyed averaged USD 2.0 billion in assets and 15 staff. On a SAR 200 million balance sheet, 41 basis points is roughly SAR 820,000 a year, before the office has recruited anyone senior enough to be worth the name.
Sources: UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, survey of 317 family offices, 22 January to 4 April 2025; strategic asset allocation for 2024. Deloitte Private, Family Office Insights Series, Global Edition: Defining the Family Office Landscape, 2024 (354 single family offices surveyed).
The function
Six things an office does, whoever does them
Almost all of the work falls under six headings. None of them requires a building; each of them requires someone to own it.
The balance sheet
Who owns what, through which company, in which country and currency, and what each asset is for. Land and property, the trading business, bank relationships in Riyadh and abroad, portfolios, receivables and guarantees. Kept current, not assembled at a funeral.
The policy
An Investor Policy Statement: return objectives, risk limits, the liquidity the family must keep to hand, time horizons, each member's residency, the Shariah screening the family accepts, and who decides what. Written, agreed, reviewed every year.
Allocation and implementation
The two decisions Saudi families most often skip: how much Saudi exposure against how much global, and how much public against how much private. Then a transition plan from today's holdings to the target, with a divestment calendar for what will take years.
Consolidated oversight
Performance, cost and exposure across every bank and custodian, per family member and in aggregate, on the same date each year. The family reads one report and can check what was done against what was written.
Structuring and succession
Which entity should hold which asset and why; how the properties and the business pass on incapacity or death without being frozen in court; and coordination of the Saudi and foreign lawyers the family appoints to draft the structures.
Governance
Decision rights across siblings and cousins, a meeting cadence, a family council once more than one generation is at the table, and a succession plan for the office itself. This is what separates first-generation wealth from third-generation wealth.
The evidence
Two sovereign playbooks, and what a family should borrow
The Kingdom's own fund and the fund next door allocate in opposite ways, and both are right, because their mandates are opposite.
PIF: a development mandate
Assets under management of about SAR 3.4 trillion at end-2025, roughly USD 906 billion. PIF exists to build the Saudi economy, so it holds three quarters of its assets at home.
Source: Public Investment Fund, Annual Report 2025; assets under management at end-2025.
ADIA: a preservation mandate
Long-term strategy portfolio ranges. ADIA exists to preserve capital for future generations, and states that as a matter of practice it does not invest in the UAE. Real estate is capped at 10%.
Source: Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, 2024 Review; long-term strategy portfolio ranges. Ranges show where allocations may fluctuate and do not total 100%.
A family's mandate is the second one. Its income, its business and its property already give it more exposure to the Kingdom's economy than any sovereign fund would choose on purpose. The role of the investable portfolio is to answer to something else.
The peer group
What the world's family offices actually hold
Family offices worldwide, 2024
Strategic allocation of 317 family offices with an average family net worth of USD 2.7 billion: 56% traditional, 44% alternative.
Middle East family offices, 2024
The regional cut: more private equity and real estate than the global average, less fixed income. Notably, still spread across eight asset classes.
A pension fund reaches the same answer
CPP Investments manages the Canada Pension Plan for more than 22 million contributors and beneficiaries. At 31 March 2026 it held C$793.3 billion: 36% public equities, 22% private equities, 20% real assets, 13% government bonds and 9% credit, with a 7.8% return for the year and 8.8% a year over ten. Different country, different purpose, same structure: many engines, no single point of failure.
Sources: UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, survey of 317 family offices, 22 January to 4 April 2025; strategic asset allocation for 2024. CPP Investments, Fiscal 2026 Annual Report; asset class composition as at 31 March 2026. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
The problem it solves
One economy, four times over
Set those allocations beside a typical Saudi family balance sheet and the gap is plain.
The typical sheet holds the family business, usually the largest asset and the least liquid. Residential and commercial property in Riyadh, Jeddah or the Eastern Province, often held personally and often unlet. Tadawul positions, some of them in companies the family has ties to. Cash at two or three banks, and sometimes a Swiss or London relationship that nobody has reconciled with the rest.
Each looks like a separate holding. All of them respond to the same economy, and that economy's revenue base remains materially exposed to a single commodity price. A family office does not tell a family to sell what it built. It makes the concentration visible, sets a deliberate limit on it, and builds the remainder so that it does not share the same weather.
The typical Saudi family balance sheet
Family businessSaudi propertyTadawul holdingsCash at several banksAn unreconciled offshore accountThe institutional balance sheet
Global public equitiesSukuk and global fixed incomePrivate equityPrivate creditReal estate, sizedInfrastructureFinancial alternativesCash, with a jobThe threshold
Who needs one? Count the moving parts
Net worth is the wrong test. The right test is whether the family's affairs already produce a family office's workload. Count how many of these apply.
- Wealth held through more than one entity: personal names, the trading company, a holding company, accounts belonging to children.
- Assets, or family members, in more than one country, or spending in more than one currency.
- More than one generation, or more than one branch of the family, with a stake in the decisions.
- Commitments with real dates: university abroad, a property completion, a business succession, a retirement.
- A concentration that would take years, not weeks, to unwind.
Two or more, and the work exists whether or not anyone is doing it.
Three ways to get it done
| Route | What it is | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Single-family office | A company the family owns and staffs in the Kingdom or abroad. Full control, full cost; UBS's survey puts the running cost near 41 basis points of assets, and higher for smaller offices. | Balance sheets large enough to justify a permanent payroll, typically well into the hundreds of millions. |
| Specialised advisory | A licensed adviser delivers the function: balance sheet, policy, allocation, consolidated oversight and a senior person accountable. The family keeps its assets where it holds them, in its own name. | Families whose wealth has outgrown a single account and who want the discipline without the institution. |
| Self-managed, with fractional specialists | A family member acts as chief executive of the family's wealth and retains a lawyer, an accountant and a Shariah adviser as required. | Works when someone has the time and temperament to run the cadence. Strains when that person is also running the business. |
Case study
A Saudi family, anonymised
A real engagement, with identifying details removed. It shows what the workload looks like at the upper end of the scale, and why every item on the list applies at smaller sizes too.
- The family
- Saudi nationals. A patriarch in his seventies with more than five adult children, each with different residency intentions, tax circumstances and income needs. A real estate portfolio worth more than USD 500 million across the Kingdom and the United Kingdom, built by holding key trophy assets, and more than USD 100 million of financial assets spread across three Swiss private banking relationships.
- What the patriarch wanted
- That the real estate stay owned by the family and well managed if he became incapacitated or died; that the assets not be locked in courts; and that each child's needs be met without the family's wealth being run as one undifferentiated pool.
- What the family office was built to do
- Active investments. A clear framework for decisions on the real estate: sales, purchases, renovations, leasing and income distributions, with property managers reporting into it. Structures, including trusts and offshore corporate entities, created with outsourced legal teams so that the assets would not be frozen on death or incapacity.
- Passive investments. There had been no holistic approach to the financial assets across the three banks. A consolidated balance sheet was built for each adult family member, followed by an Investor Policy Statement for each, covering tax residency, liquidity needs, income requirements and unique circumstances.
- The concentration note. Each policy statement recorded, in writing, how much of that member's net wealth sat in the family's active real estate, so that the financial portfolio could be built to complement it rather than repeat it.
- What it amounts to
- A single office, funded by the family, that turned three bank relationships and a property empire into one picture, one set of rules per person, and a succession that does not depend on a court's timetable.
How Vault Saudi does it
Specialised advisory for family offices
Vault Saudi Limited Company is licensed by the Capital Market Authority of Saudi Arabia to provide advisory services, and is based in Riyadh. For families whose wealth has outgrown a single account, it delivers the family office function as advice: the balance sheet, the policy, the allocation, the oversight and the governance, with the family's assets staying where the family holds them, in its own name.
We act as fiduciaries. We do not sell products, and our advice is not funded by the things it recommends. Where a structure needs a lawyer, an accountant or a Shariah scholar, we coordinate with the specialists the family appoints and say plainly when a question belongs to them.
Balance sheet mapping
Every entity, account, property and commitment across the Kingdom and abroad, consolidated into one view for the family and one for each adult member.
Investor Policy Statement
Objectives, constraints, liquidity, residency, Shariah requirements and decision rights, drafted with the family, reviewed annually.
Allocation strategy
The Saudi versus global split, the public versus private split, and a transition plan from today's holdings to the target, including illiquid positions that take years to unwind.
Shariah-compliant construction
Screened equity, sukuk and compliant fund ranges across the main asset classes, with the screening methodology written into the policy.
Estate and succession guidance
Planning how the business and the properties pass across generations, alongside the family's Saudi and foreign legal advisers.
Oversight and governance
Consolidated review of every relationship on the same date each year, a meeting cadence, and support for a family council where the family is large enough.
Questions families ask
Before you ask us
What is a family office, and how is it different from a private banking relationship?
A family office is a business whose only client is one family. It keeps the whole balance sheet in view, invests it against a written policy and governs how decisions are made across entities and generations. A private bank holds and manages one account within that picture. The two are not alternatives; a family office sits above the banks and asks whether, together, they add up to what the family intends.
How large does a Saudi family need to be to think about this?
Large enough to have the workload, which arrives earlier than most families expect. A single-family office with its own staff is an institution: the offices Deloitte surveyed in 2024 managed an average of USD 2.0 billion with 15 staff, and UBS puts the pure running cost at 41.1 basis points of assets. The function itself, one balance sheet, a written policy, a consolidated view and someone accountable, can be delivered by a regulated adviser to families a fraction of that size.
Can a family office portfolio be fully Shariah-compliant?
Yes. Screened global equity indices, sukuk, murabaha deposits and compliant fund ranges now cover the main asset classes, and the choice is wide enough that compliance costs diversification very little. The Investor Policy Statement is where the requirement is written down, together with the screening methodology the family accepts, so that every later decision is tested against it rather than against memory.
How does zakat fit into a family office?
Zakat is assessed on wealth rather than income, so the composition of the family's assets changes the annual obligation. A consolidated balance sheet is therefore useful twice: once for the allocation and once for the calculation, because the family knows what it holds, where and on what basis, on the same date each year. The calculation itself belongs with a qualified scholar; the office's job is to make sure the numbers it is given are complete.
What does Vault Saudi do for a family office?
Specialised advisory for families whose wealth has outgrown a single account: mapping the balance sheet across entities and jurisdictions, drafting the Investor Policy Statement, designing the strategic allocation including the split between Saudi and global exposure and between public and private markets, guiding estate and succession planning alongside the family's legal advisers, and holding the family to a review cadence. Vault Saudi Limited Company is licensed by the Capital Market Authority to provide advisory services and is based in Riyadh.
Is Vault Saudi the same firm as Vault Wealth in Abu Dhabi?
They are sister entities with distinct licences. Vault Saudi Limited Company is licensed by the Capital Market Authority of Saudi Arabia (licence 25313-20) to provide advisory services. Vault Wealth Limited is regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of the Abu Dhabi Global Market. Their services, fee models and regulators differ, and a Saudi family engages Vault Saudi.
Keep reading
Sources
- UBS Global Family Office Report 2025, survey of 317 family offices, 22 January to 4 April 2025; strategic asset allocation for 2024.
- Deloitte Private, Family Office Insights Series, Global Edition: Defining the Family Office Landscape, 2024 (354 single family offices surveyed).
- Public Investment Fund, Annual Report 2025; assets under management at end-2025.
- Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, 2024 Review; long-term strategy portfolio ranges. Ranges show where allocations may fluctuate and do not total 100%.
- CPP Investments, Fiscal 2026 Annual Report; asset class composition as at 31 March 2026.
Next step
Start with the balance sheet, not the product
Open an account and a senior Vault Saudi adviser will map the family's entities into one view and set out what an Investor Policy Statement would need to cover before anything is decided.