By Kevin Reed, Chief Revenue Officer, Aquilance. 
Notes on winning Rising Star Under 40 at the 13th Annual Family Wealth Report Awards (April 30, 2026, Mandarin Oriental, New York). 

The Family Wealth Report Awards are the closest thing the North American wealth advisory industry has to an Oscars night. The thirteenth annual edition convened at the Mandarin Oriental in New York on April 30, 2026, organized by ClearView Financial Media and judged by an independent panel of family office executives, private bankers, technology specialists, and consultants. There is no pay-to-play tier. Finalists are drawn from a competitive pool of wirehouses, private banks, trust companies, RIAs, family offices, and industry service or tech firms across North America. The Rising Star Under 40 category, is a long shot for any individual nominee.  

I realize that the trophy has my name on it. But the work behind it has many names on it. 

The Nomination and What it Points Toward

The nomination came from John Carey, our CEO at Aquilance. John is a 37-year veteran of this this industry. He does not nominate people for trophies. He nominates them for the work the firm has produced in a given year, and the trophy becomes a permanent record of that work for the rest of the industry to see. 

What the nomination pointed at was a year spent building the unbundled family office model for independent RIAs. The push has been specific: take operational infrastructure that traditionally requires $100M in client assets and deliver it to families with $10M to $50M in net worth. “Outsourced family office services for Wealth Firms” is the technical name for that category of work. Internally, we refer to this as the service expectation gap.  My role was to act as a bridge. I spoke directly with top wealth management firms and UHNW-focused advisors to document exactly what their clients were asking for. Then, I took those visceral needs and aligned them with the raw capabilities of our operations team. 

That work belongs to the Aquilance operations team. Many have been at the firm for ten years or more, quietly running the execution layer for hundreds of families and advisors at firms across the country.  

The judges did not get a chance to meet them. They saw the output. The trophy is a proxy. 

The Service Expectation Gap, in One Paragraph 

A family with $30M in net worth typically operates four legal entities, two or three homes, and a personal assistant that needs payroll run on schedule. A traditional single-family office needs $250M+ in assets to justify supporting all of this. Between those two tiers sits a wide band of households, the merely wealthy, who expect family-office-style services and have no infrastructure to deliver them. Cerulli Associates put the inflection point at $10M of net worth back in 2023. Fidelity Investments’ 2024 RIA Benchmarking Study found that only 13% of RIAs offer bill pay, bookkeeping, or consolidated reporting. The gap between what those clients want and what the wealth advisory industry delivers is the single largest service deficiency in modern wealth management. Outsourced family office services for RIAs is the category that closes that gap. It is also the category of work the awards panel was evaluating when the 2026 winners were called. 

The Thank You  

What the judges were really evaluating was the operating model the team has been running. The role I’ve played these past two years has been to take that model out into the market, strategize with dozens of firm executives who need a UHNW strategy, talk with hundreds of private bankers and financial advisors, and translate what those firms told us back into product and service priorities.The model worked. The judges noticed. 

The Rising Star Under 40 award goes to an individual because that is how the category is structured. Operating models are not built by individuals alone. They are built by teams. The surface that the rest of the market sees, the surface called outsourced family office services for RIAs, sits on top of that work. 

The Operating Thesis: Outsourced Family Office Services for RIAs as the Differentiator 

All of the award recognitions that Aquilance and our team members win point to a single operating thesis: that outsourced family office services for RIAs are not a back-office cost line. They are the third leg of the modern advisory stool, the execution layer that runs underneath the planning and the portfolio. Firms that own the third leg keep the relationships when wealth transfers. Firms that do not are losing share. 

The argument is not new. The Barron’s Advisor Independent Summit panel earlier this year carried it. Two decades of distribution work at Morningstar, Merrill Lynch, and PNC framed it. White papers circulated to the firm’s RIA partners since 2024 documented it. What is new is the external validation. The 2026 recognition, both the firm’s bill pay finalist nod and the individual Rising Star award, is the strongest external signal yet that the rest of the wealth advisory industry is starting to agree. Outsourced family office services are no longer an optional capability for firms competing for clients with a net worth above $10M. The category that used to be called back office is now being called what it is: a fractional family CFO function, delivered through a white-labeled execution partner, available to households one or two tiers below the traditional family-office threshold. 

Kevin Reed
Chief Revenue Officer, Aquilance 

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About Aquilance 

Aquilance is a financial administration firm. The firm provides outsourced family office services for RIAs, including white-labeled bill pay, concierge bookkeeping, multi-entity accounting, household payroll, and consolidated reporting for high-net-worth families and the wealth advisory firms that serve them. Founded 37 years ago, Aquilance gives families and advisors the precision of a single-family office without the staffing overhead. Each client family is paired with a dedicated relationship manager and team. Average employee tenure exceeds ten years. 

To learn more about partnering with Aquilance, or to discuss white-labeled execution for your firm, book a private workshop with our team.