Wealth management today goes far beyond asset allocation or investment performance. Behind the numbers, there are families — with ambitions, legacies, and sometimes tensions. The real question is: how can families preserve harmony while preparing their financial future?
This is the question that led to the creation of Abbove, a wealth planning platform designed to put the family and long-term vision back at the heart of the client–advisor relationship.
Understanding families’ real challenges
When founding Abbove (initially known as PaxFamilia), the team organized a series of workshops with psychologists, notaries, bankers, and over 120 family decision-makers.
The goal was to understand the challenges families truly face when managing their wealth.
The conclusion was clear: what worried these families most wasn’t their financial performance — it was the potential impact of their wealth decisions on family harmony.
Three recurring pain points emerged:
- Complexity and lack of understanding of their overall situation, often involving multiple structures or international family setups.
- Fragmented data and documentation, with no single, reliable source of truth.
- Anxiety about the future, due to poor preparation for key life or inheritance events.
From these insights came a strong conviction: family peace depends on two key elements. A clear, shared understanding of the family’s wealth, and open communication between all stakeholders: spouses, children, and trusted advisors.
This is the foundation of Abbove: a secure, structured, and collaborative platform that centralizes all family and wealth information in one place. It enables families and their advisors to engage in objective, transparent, and constructive discussions about past, present, and future wealth decisions.
From family tool to professional solution
As Abbove grew, more and more families began using the platform.
Soon, their advisors — invited by their clients to consult the data — started asking whether they could also use Abbove under their own brand, to offer the same service to their clients.
That marked a turning point. Abbove shifted from a direct-to-family model to a B2B2C model, empowering private banks and family offices to provide personalized digital wealth planning services.
The platform evolved to meet advisors’ needs, connecting client data to a suite of planning, advisory, and reporting tools.
Today, over 1,000 advisors from private banks and family offices use Abbove to support 40,000 families across Europe, representing more than 200,000 family members.
The mission is clear: help advisors systematize a holistic, family-centered approach to wealth, and turn wealth planning into a meaningful, long-term relationship driver.
The great wealth transfer: a turning point for the industry
This shift is happening at a critical time.
The wealth management industry is facing one of the largest transitions in history — the great wealth transfer.
Boomer wealth is moving to spouses and the next generations, whose expectations are profoundly different.
A few key facts highlight the magnitude of this change:
- The wealth of generations Y, Z, and millennials is expected to quadruple in the coming years.
- 80% of heirs plan to change their advisor within two years of inheriting, mainly because they feel excluded from the relationship.
- For these generations, asset management represents only 30% of the perceived value of the advisor, compared to 50% for boomers.
They expect a more personalized, goal-oriented, and tech-enabled approach — one that connects financial purpose with life purpose.
A new role for the wealth advisor
Advisors today must evolve.
Their mission is no longer limited to managing portfolios but to orchestrating family wealth conversations across generations.
This requires:
- Simplifying and humanizing complex wealth topics;
- Including spouses and children in the dialogue;
- And adopting a truly holistic perspective that integrates financial, legal, and emotional dimensions.
In short, the advisor becomes a conductor of the family wealth relationship — helping turn financial assets into shared purpose and continuity.
That’s exactly what Abbove enables: creating a structured, transparent space where wealth, family, and legacy come together with clarity and meaning.
