Why Business Schools Are Entering Territory Where Private Banks Charged Without Competition
There is a particular moment in the life of a business family that private banks learned to recognize before anyone else: the instant when the founder begins to look at his children with a mixture of pride and concern. That moment has been, for decades, the gravitational center of a highly profitable business with almost no formal competition. High-net-worth private banking built its moat there: privileged access, a language of trust, discretion, and the illusion that personalized advice was sufficient to prepare the next generation.
Business schools have spent years looking at that territory from the outside. Now they are inside it.
What the Financial Times described as executive courses aimed at wealthy families is not a peripheral trend in the academic world. It is a calculated move toward a segment where demand is structurally guaranteed by factors that do not depend on the economic cycle: a wealth transfer estimated at 83 trillion dollars over the next two decades, according to UBS figures, increasingly complex ownership structures, and heir generations who did not arrive asking for jobs in banking, but rather seeking to understand how to manage what they already possess. Patricia Angus, adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, documented this with precision: twelve years ago she had to explain what a family office was; today students arrive asking how to get a job at one.
That migration of interest is not cosmetic. It is the symptom of a reconfiguration of power in wealth management that has concrete implications for those who currently control that market.
What the Programs Sell and What Families Actually Need
IMD in Lausanne charges 11,900 Swiss francs for five days on the shores of Lake Geneva. Wharton offers its Family Office Program over five days. Chicago Booth does it with families that have more than twenty million dollars in assets. Harvard, Kellogg, HEC Paris, SDA Bocconi in Milan, and HKUST in Hong Kong have built their own versions. The format repeats itself with variations: intensive, in-person, small, and selective. In Asia, access is not even marketed openly; it works by referral, because the mere presence in a public directory can drive away the very person one is trying to attract.
The question these programs answer on paper is one of governance: how to structure a family office, how to plan succession, how to design agreements between family branches. But what IMD observed in practice among its own participants is more revealing than the official curriculum. Matthew Crudgington, director of that institution's Global Family Business Center, stated it with precision: the majority arrive thinking about strategy and end up discovering that the central problem is communication. Twenty-five years of distance between siblings, broken relationships that are passed on to the next generation, investment decisions blocked not by a lack of capital but by a lack of trust among shareholders who share a surname. Formal governance does not resolve that on its own.
This matters strategically because it points to a gap that neither banks nor schools have closed with consistency. The former have the financial muscle and the access, but they are structurally inclined toward the execution of transactions. The latter offer an academic framework and independence, but Honora Ducatillon, of Pictet Wealth Management, was direct: there are families who finish a program without a clear road map for their specific situation, and that frustration is the Achilles' heel of academia when facing private banking.
The underlying question is not who teaches a better class about family offices. It is who manages to be present at the moment of the real decision, when a family has to choose whether to sell, whether to fragment ownership, whether to call in an external professional to lead what the founder built alone. That moment is not captured with a five-day certificate.
The Fracture Between What Is Declared and What Is Actually Financed
There is a pattern that appears in almost all the players in this movement and that deserves more attention than the enthusiasm for the educational offering: the distance between declared ambition and the architecture of resources that supports it.
Schools are expanding programs, but the expansion occurs primarily in the short executive segment, not in deep research on family dynamics. The difference matters. A five-day program with 23 participants at 15,000 dollars per head generates manageable revenues. What it does not necessarily generate is the kind of accumulated knowledge that would allow a school to tell a particular family: your specific problem has these probabilities of resolution with this type of intervention. That predictive capacity, based on longitudinal data about real families, is something no short-duration program can build quickly.
Nadine Mottu, of Lombard Odier, framed this with a phrase that neatly summarizes the banking position: you do not need a bank to do academic studies, you need it for the practical part. It is a territorial delimitation that sounds defensive because it is, but that also points to something true: the capacity to translate a theoretical framework into an executable decision with concrete legal, fiscal, and relational consequences still resides mainly in those who have spent decades operating within that environment, even if that environment is precisely one we must describe carefully to avoid falling into corporate euphemism.
The structural problem of private banking is not that it lacks knowledge. It is that this knowledge is mixed with a direct economic incentive toward the retention of assets under management. A better-educated family, with a greater capacity to supervise its advisors, with its own criteria for evaluating returns and fee structures, is potentially a family that renegotiates terms. Chicago Booth says it plainly in the description of its program: one of the objectives is for participants to have more control over their financial advisors. That sentence, in the context of an academic program aimed at assets of twenty million dollars or more, is a declaration of intent that private banks should read carefully.
The Moment Before the Decision Is Still the Most Expensive
Andrea Calabrò, of SDA Bocconi, captured a structural problem that goes beyond education: if a family business has been doing the same thing successfully for 150 years, changing or innovating is very difficult. Institutionalized inertia is the least visible adversary of succession planning, and no five-day program undoes 150 years of organizational identity.
Dominic Samuelson, of Campden Wealth, was more direct about the practical limitations of the market: there is a lot of talking and very little acting. Cost and time are real barriers. The interest of the inheriting generation is often limited. This describes a segment with real demand but with a conversion rate that the players themselves recognize as imperfect. The most complex families, with thousands of shareholders distributed across several countries as in the case of the Solvay dynasty, are those that most need these programs and also those that find it most difficult to arrive at them as a cohesive group.
Stephanie de Wangen, sixth generation of that family, articulated the value she found in the IMD with an economy of words worth more than any brochure: communication is the glue that brings unity. She did not say it as a novel insight. She said it as something that her family, with 163 years of history and consolidated governance structures, still needs to work on.
The market for executive education aimed at wealthy families is not going to replace private banking or specialized advisors. What it is doing is something more strategically interesting: it is redistributing information. Families who go through these programs arrive at conversations with their banks with a different vocabulary, with evaluation criteria they did not learn from the bank itself, and with a clearer understanding of where technical knowledge ends and the commercial interest of the advisor begins.
That is not a threat to the wealth management industry. It is the condition that forces that industry to improve the quality of what it delivers. Business schools did not win this territory because they offer something superior. They won it because the ground was more unprotected than it appeared, and because a generation of heirs decided that arriving unprepared to a family shareholder meeting was a risk they could reduce. The cost of that preparation, at 15,000 dollars for five days in Lausanne, is insignificant compared to what is at stake when the meeting takes place without it.
