The Family Wealth Alliance

The Family Wealth Alliance

Tom Livergood founded The Family Wealth Alliance in 2003 after stints at Harris Private Bank and as a founding director of the Multi-Family Office Community at Family Office Exchange. The firm started as a research outfit, releasing the first public listing of North American multi-family offices in 2004 and establishing Multifamily Office Standards a year later. Over two decades it evolved into a selective membership body for advisory firms only—no competing constituencies from the client side. The Alliance's member firms collectively advise on more than $1 trillion of assets. Its roster includes multi-family offices, external CIOs, trust companies, and the family office practices of law and accounting firms—all B2B, all North America-focused. The platform sponsors Alliance Talks and a bound directory called Forte, and its Alliance Research unit produces benchmarking studies and trend syntheses. In January 2023 Charles Schwab acquired the Alliance, folding its events and data offerings into Schwab's advisor-services strategy without altering the membership model. A staff of 14 operates from Wheaton, Illinois, supporting roughly two dozen annual events and a steady cadence of industry reports. The Member Advisory Board includes executives from Aspiriant, Pitcairn, Pathstone, and Callan Family Office. In the 2025 Alliance Wrapped report—the latest annual retrospective—the firm spotlighted its expansion of the Forte directory and its growing suite of on-demand research. The Alliance's structure solves a genuine coordination problem: it aggregates benchmarking data and facilitates peer exchange that individual multi-family offices could not replicate on their own. That Schwab chose to buy rather than build this network signals a bet that curated community is harder to replicate than asset-management technology.