BBVA launches a bank-owned 'independent' multi-family office in Spain
BBVA Private Banking has opened a multi-family office for fortunes of €30–300 million, structured as a separate company with open-architecture custody. The word doing the heavy lifting is 'independent'.
On 2 July 2026, BBVA Private Banking announced the launch of a multi-family office aimed at fortunes between €30 million and €300 million. It is led by César Solera, head of BBVA Multi-Family Office in Spain, and has been set up as a separate company rather than a desk inside the private bank. The service is live in Spain and the bank says it will extend to other markets where it operates, at a pace that depends on demand from ultra-wealthy clients in each country.
What has actually been built
The unit starts with ten senior professionals, each with more than twenty years of experience, working from offices in a prime part of Madrid rather than standard BBVA branches. Fernando Ruiz, head of BBVA Private Banking, said the target is not the bank’s existing private banking clients but high-net-worth individuals and business families who want a proposal spanning several entities, with an emphasis on governance. He also flagged demand from Latin American families as part of the rationale.
BBVA has organised the offer around four areas: investment strategy across listed markets, private markets and real assets; wealth planning covering structure, taxation and succession; governance and legacy, including preparing heirs; and what it calls purpose and lifestyle, which takes in philanthropy and art collection management. The model runs on multi-bank operations and open architecture, so a family can consolidate its holdings regardless of which institutions it uses.
The word ‘independent’ is doing a lot of work
BBVA’s own framing is careful. Solera and Ruiz stressed that the new service is a separate company with autonomy, and that it complements rather than competes with the bank’s private banking arm. That distinction matters, because a multi-family office is supposed to sit on the client’s side of the table and advise across providers. A unit wholly owned by a large retail and private bank has to show, in practice, that its open architecture reaches beyond the parent’s own products.
The Evertern–Vontobel alliance we covered on 30 June raised the same question from the other direction: an independent US firm whose international banking door opened onto a single partner. BBVA sits at the opposite corner, a bank claiming genuine openness. In both cases the test is the same, and it is one families can apply themselves: ask where assets are custodied, which products the adviser is paid on, and what happens when the best answer is a competitor’s.
Why banks are moving into this space
The launch fits a wider pattern of banks and large advisory firms building or buying multi-family office capability rather than leaving that segment to boutiques. The 2026 UBS Global Family Office Report, which surveyed 307 family offices with an average net worth of $2.7 billion, found more of them planning to change their strategic asset allocation than at any point this decade. Families with €30 million and up increasingly want one coordinated view of listed assets, private markets, property and succession, and they are willing to pay for it.
For BBVA, an owned multi-family office keeps the fee and the relationship inside the group as clients grow out of private banking. The benefit to families is real if the open architecture holds. What to watch is whether a bank-owned adviser can recommend against its own house when the client would be better served by a competitor.
Sources: Funds Society, UBS Global Family Office Report 2026.
