Callan Family Office takes a stake in estate-planning software firm Vanilla

Estate-planning technology firm Vanilla has partnered with Callan Family Office, a registered investment adviser serving ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, foundations and endowments. The agreement, announced on 1 July, includes a strategic investment by Callan Family Office in Vanilla, a joint product development roadmap, and a coordinated go-to-market plan covering thought leadership, events and distribution across the UHNW market.

The tie-up is worth noting less for its size, which the firms did not disclose, than for its shape: a family office putting capital behind the software it uses rather than simply buying a licence for it.

Both firms frame the deal around a gap in wealth-planning software. Families with layered entity structures, wealth passing across several branches and trusts, and connections into institutional systems have been served by tools built for simpler needs, they argue. The joint development work is set to focus on consolidated multigenerational planning visualisations, entity and asset-ownership reporting, and better data connectivity across the systems family offices use day to day.

“One of the most progressive and successful multifamily offices in the country is choosing Vanilla as their partner to develop the future of ultra-high-net-worth planning,” said Gene Farrell, chief executive of Vanilla, who described the deal as a reflection of the firm’s “depth, sophistication, and track record”. Jack Ginter, chief executive of Callan Family Office, said his firm had seen the limits of existing systems in handling the most complex estate planning, and viewed the partnership as a way to combine technology with practitioner experience so that families can preserve wealth across generations.

For a family office, the logic of an equity stake is straightforward enough. It aligns the vendor’s roadmap with the office’s own requirements and gives it a say in what gets built first. The trade-off is a tighter dependence on a single provider, and the usual questions that follow when a firm both uses and owns part of a supplier it may also recommend to peers.

Estate and succession planning is one of the harder functions to systematise at the top of the wealth scale, where a single family can sit behind dozens of entities across several jurisdictions. Off-the-shelf planning tools tend to assume a simpler picture, which is why much of the work still runs through lawyers and spreadsheets. A roadmap written with a large multifamily office in the room is a bet that the software can finally hold that complexity.

Whether the partnership delivers on that is a question for the product, not the press release. For now it is a useful marker of where family offices are spending. Alongside advisers and managers, the money is going into the technology underneath them, and increasingly into a stake in the companies that build it. Details of the agreement were reported by Connect Money.