Family-office build-out part of a broader push for growth by law firm's RIA. Silver Bridge Advisors has hired Allison Taff, formerly head of business development and marketing for Fidelity's Family Office Services (FOS) group, as director of its own Family Office Services offering, a new position. The appointment supports Silver Bridge's efforts to bring in more ultra-high-net-worth business as part of a broad enterprise-growth strategy.

"Family Office Services is a core component of our business that we will be refining over time," says Silver Bridge's president and COO Stephen Prostano. "Allison brings a deep expertise in creating family-office solutions that will provide wealthy families with a structure to manage their wealth effectively and to pass on their legacy to future generations."

Silver Bridge's CIO Tom Manning agrees. "Allison's extensive understanding of family office needs, combined with her distinct experience in developing family office technology platforms, market intelligence and strong knowledge of competitors' offerings and best practices made her the ideal candidate," he says "Her addition will enable Silver Bridge to take our offering and platform to the next level, and to truly satisfy the needs of family office clients."

Reformation

Boston-based Silver Bridge, known as Hale and Dorr Wealth Advisors until late last year, is an 80-year-old affiliate of the law firm WilmerHale. The name change is part of campaign, begun in 2005 with Prostano's arrival from Atlantic Trust, to make the firm more efficient and competitive. Among these initiatives is an ownership plan that aims to put about half of the firm's equity in the hands of its employees, an expanded investment platform to accommodate outside as well as in-house products, and new data-aggregation and performance-reporting systems of its own design and construction.

Silver Bridge's family-office capabilities are partly by-products of its re-vamped investment and technology platforms.

Taff joined Fidelity from Advent Software 's family-office unit in 2004 to lead the promotional and business-development efforts of its then-new FOS group; a technology, investment and consulting business for families least $75 million in financial assets. Before it was hit with lay offs last year -- related its need "to re-build a scalable and cost-effective platform that's not entirely reliant on proprietary technology," as Fidelity put it at the time -- FOS had more than 150 staffers.

Early this year Fidelity named former Citigroup executive Ed Orazem as FOS' fourth chief in about sixteen months. Founding president Lee Weiss left the group late in the summer of 2007 to establish a high-end investment advisory called Family Endowment Partners. His replacement Roger Hobby had the job until last June, when he joined Wilmington Trust. John Hurley, a member of Fidelity's consulting business, became FOS' interim president while the fund company conducted the search that took them to Orazem.

In her new role as head of Silver Bridge's family-office unit, Taff works with the firm's advisory, technology and operations teams to enhance the firm's family-office services and ensure that they're meeting the needs and expectations of the families it serves.

Cost and complexity

The main difference between Fidelity's FOS and Silver Bridge's Family Office Services is that FOS is an outsourced offering to family offices while Silver Bridge's Family Office Services is a product and service platform available exclusively as an in-house offering to the firm's private clients. In effect, it's the basis for Silver Bridge to provide family-office services to ultra-wealthy families that can't afford family offices or can't be bothered running their own.

It can cost $1 million a year to run a family office that covers investment advisory, financial, tax and estate planning and a modicum of concierge services for a large and far-flung family, according to several industry estimates. So it makes little sense for families with less than $100 million in financial assets -- some would say $200 million -- to operate a family office.

Silver Bridge Family Office Services, which already has about a dozen clients, is targeting families with between $30 million and $100 million "that need family-office services," according to Taff. "We're talking about multi-jurisdictional, multi-generational families with complex reporting needs and [the desire for] more sophisticated investment products."

With those parameters in mind, Silver Bridge sees a number of its investment-advisory clients as potential candidates for conversion to its Family Office Services platform.

"We're also talking to some very wealthy families; ones that could but really don't want to create the [family-office] infrastructure themselves," adds Taff. "They just don't want the headaches."

In addition to building out its family business under Taff, SilverBridge is looking for opportunities to establish new offices.

"We have nothing planned specifically, but we are looking opportunities as part of our growth strategy," says Prostano. "The most obvious places for us initially would be New York, the mid-Atlantic region, or Florida -- places where we've got clients and where we're already traveling a great deal to see clients."

SilverBridge has about $1.3 billion in assets under management -FWR

Purchase reproduction rights to this article