New family offices want direct deals, not hedge funds, Fintrx Q2 data shows

Fintrx published the second-quarter edition of its Family Office Report on 17 August 2026, covering the firms and people it added to its platform in the three months to 30 June. The headline finding is a gap. Of the 96 family offices added during the quarter, 10.4 per cent listed an interest in hedge funds. Across the whole Fintrx platform, the figure is 38.2 per cent.

Private credit shows the same pattern, more sharply. It appeared in 6.3 per cent of second-quarter additions, down from 19.3 per cent of the firms added in the first quarter.

What the new cohort does want is deals. Direct investments were listed by 92.7 per cent of additions and private equity by 89.6 per cent, against 83.2 per cent for each in the first-quarter group, and 80.7 and 79.1 per cent respectively across the full database. Patrick Galvin, the Fintrx research associate who wrote the report, said newer and younger family offices “continue to gravitate heavily toward direct and equity-oriented strategies rather than externally managed fund structures”.

Single, first-generation, mostly unregistered

Of the 96 firms, 68 are single family offices and 28 multi-family offices. That puts single family offices at 70.8 per cent of additions, up from 63 per cent in the first quarter, and well ahead of the platform as a whole, which is 52.7 per cent single and 47.3 per cent multi. Of the 28 new multi-family offices, 24 are not registered with the SEC.

The geographic split was North America 43, Europe 26, Asia and Oceania 19, Africa and the Middle East eight, and Latin America none.

Wealth origin points in the same direction as the asset preferences. Some 68.6 per cent of newly classified family offices were entrepreneur-origin, up from 57 per cent in the first quarter, with private investing, technology and real estate the largest source industries. Founders who have sold something recently, in other words, and who show little inclination to hand the proceeds to a fund manager.

The report also counts people: 1,487 new family office contacts against nearly 30,000 on the platform. Contacts at newly added firms were 20.8 per cent female, against 37.2 per cent for contacts added to firms already covered. Global banks and Big Four accounting firms remain common previous employers.

What the data is, and what it is not

It is worth being precise about what is being measured here. These are firms entering a commercial database, not a survey sample and not the family office market. A quarter’s coverage additions reflect which firms Fintrx located and classified, and that is shaped by how visible a firm is as much as by how it invests. Single family offices that keep quiet are hard to find. The ones that surface tend to be doing something public, and a direct deal is public in a way that a hedge fund allocation is not. The figures reflect the state of the database as of 30 June 2026, which now holds more than 4,600 family office profiles.

The caveat does not dissolve the gap. A near four-to-one difference on hedge funds between new arrivals and the wider platform is large, and the private credit reading has now fallen across two consecutive quarters.

For advisers, the useful question is what these arrivals will ask for. A first-generation single family office, unregistered, built around direct holdings, needs deal diligence, structuring and reporting rather than manager selection, and is less likely to have any of it in place. Capital-raising teams reading the same numbers will reach the opposite conclusion: the pool of new family offices willing to look at a commingled vehicle is thinner than the totals suggest.

Sources: Fintrx, Q2 2026 Family Office Report press release, 17 August 2026; PR Newswire.