In wealth management or family offices services, clients and advisors frequently encounter events that impact needs and services.  These catalysts may prompt a client to initiate, change, add, or discard advisory services. Catalysts may be predictable and planned, or they may occur seemingly without warning. Catalysts may also be relatively minor, such as switching to a new relationship manager, or highly significant, such as the death of a family leader or a major liquidity event.  Being able to identify and respond appropriately to catalysts requires resilience, skills, and expertise on the part of both the client and the advisory team.

The UHNW Institute’s Integrated Family Wealth Management Initiative identifies four main categories of common catalysts as the first step in a progression that connects client families with advisory services:  

• External or environmental catalysts: economic, political, governmental, judicial, health, and other situational events surrounding the client and the advisory team.
• Family catalysts:  entrances or exits of members of the family, changes in residency, generational transitions affecting leadership or governance, ownership changes, a shift in values or goals, health events such as disability or death, or a new focus on learning or education requiring effective responses.
• Advisory catalysts:  changes or limitations in individual advisors or the team; firm-level changes impacting service delivery or client satisfaction; prospecting by new advisors that draw a family away to a new firm; changes in service quality or scope; or regulatory, jurisdictional, legal, or tax changes imposed upon the firm.
• Wealth catalysts: bridging the client family and their advisors are catalysts in the wealth itself, such as a liquidity event, sale or loss of a business, IPOs, significant investment losses, inheritance, fraud, cybersecurity and other risk events, infusion or loss of philanthropic assets, changes to trusts or beneficiaries, or a change in the types of assets owned.