SFO Alliance loses its chief executive after less than seven months

Jeroen Vetter has left SFO Alliance, the invite-only club for single family offices, less than seven months after being appointed its chief executive. Family Capital reported the departure on 16 July 2026. Vetter had taken the role in November 2025.

What has changed

Vetter’s appointment was itself a leadership change. He replaced Keith Johnston, who co-founded the London-based group in 2020 with Lex van Dam and had run it as CEO for about five years. At the time, van Dam moved up to executive chairman and described Vetter, a member since the club’s early days, as the person to lead it into its next phase. Seven months on, that chief executive has gone. Van Dam remains as founder and executive chairman.

Family Capital’s report of the exit sits behind a subscription, and the club has not set out publicly why Vetter left or who will take over. We are not going to fill that gap with speculation. The confirmed fact is the timing: a CEO in place from November to, at the latest, mid-July.

Who Vetter is

Vetter, 55, came to the job from the practitioner side rather than the sell side. He spent about four years as chief executive of the single family office managing the fortune of Dutch entrepreneur Rudolf Booker, was previously head of the investment office at Dutch insurer Aegon, and earlier founded and ran a Dutch fund platform for roughly nine years. He had been an SFO Alliance member from early on, which was part of the pitch when he was named CEO.

What SFO Alliance is

The group is a peer-to-peer network for single family offices, the firms that manage one family’s wealth. It has grown since 2020 to more than 1,100 members, and each member firm is required to oversee at least $400 million in assets; Bloomberg put the club’s combined membership at around $440 billion when Vetter was appointed. Membership is free and vetted by the board, with most joiners arriving through referral. The club makes its money by running events with outside content partners rather than charging dues, and its calendar has featured dinners in Monaco, New York and Switzerland alongside an annual flagship in London.

Why it matters, and what to watch

Peer networks now sit alongside banks, lawyers and advisers as part of the machinery family offices actually use, and their pull rests on trust and on who is allowed in the room. A club that has changed chief executive twice inside a year, while keeping the same founder-chairman, invites a fair question about how the day-to-day is run and who sets the tone for vetting and content. None of that reflects on the members, and a free, referral-based network can absorb a change at the top more easily than a fee-paying business would. The things worth watching are practical: who becomes CEO next, whether the membership bar and the no-salespeople rule hold, and whether the events programme continues at its current pace.

Sources: Family Capital, Crain Currency / Bloomberg News, SFO Alliance.