Justin Nelson of JP Morgan Reveals Why Family Offices Are No Longer Just for Billionaires

For most of financial history, a family office was a structure reserved for dynastic wealth: the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Waltons. You needed a billion dollars, a full legal team, and a dedicated staff before the structure made economic sense. Justin Nelson, Managing Director and Head of the Asset Management and Financial Principals Coverage Team at J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Connecticut, says that picture has shifted considerably.

“A family office is an organization that’s built around a wealthy and successful individual or family to help them accomplish their goals,” Nelson explains. “They are all built differently – sometimes a family office is one person and sometimes it’s 100 people. It just depends on the specific goals.”

That flexibility is reshaping who family offices serve. Nelson oversees a team of 20 managing more than $15 billion in client assets, working directly with family offices and wealthy principals across New York and Connecticut, helping them design structures that fit their actual complexity rather than some inherited notion of what a family office is supposed to look like.

What a Family Office Actually Does

The common assumption is that a family office is purely an investment vehicle. Nelson describes something considerably broader. Services can include bill payment, private jet coordination, investment management, estate governance, philanthropic strategy, and multi-generational planning. The structure gets shaped around what the wealth creator actually needs, which varies far more than most people expect.

The numbers behind family office growth reflect genuine demand. According to research from Deloitte, there are now more than 8,000 single family offices globally, a 31% increase from 2019. Their total assets are projected to climb from $3.1 trillion today to $5.4 trillion by 2030. Much of that growth is first-generation wealth building out professional infrastructure to manage complexity that private banking alone can no longer address. The wealth is newer. The problems it creates are not.

The Threshold Has Dropped

The billionaire threshold stopped being accurate some time ago. According to NerdWallet, a multi-family office, which pools services across several wealthy families to share costs, now requires a minimum net worth of around $30 million. An outsourced family office model, where a private bank or advisory firm coordinates services on a family’s behalf, can function at $10 million and above.

Nelson’s work at J.P. Morgan sits at the center of that shift. “The family office space continues to grow as people’s financial situations become more complex while having increasing demands on their time,” he says. “A family office can help to take the burden off of the principals and help them make decisions more effectively.”

That question is reaching a much wider audience. The great wealth transfer, estimated by Cerulli Associates at $124 trillion expected to change hands in the United States through 2048, is producing a new class of inheritors who want institutional management without the scale traditionally associated with a dedicated family office. Multi-family office models, and the private banking services that function as a functional proxy for one, are filling that space quickly.

Who Actually Needs One

Justin Nelson is careful to note that the structure doesn’t fit every wealthy individual. A family office requires ongoing coordination, governance decisions, and often real personnel. For families whose financial lives are fairly straightforward, the overhead isn’t worth it. But for those managing multiple asset classes, planning generational transfers, coordinating philanthropy, or operating across jurisdictions? The formal structure earns its cost in clarity and reduced risk.

“Everyone’s different,” Nelson says simply.

That scalability is what is drawing in a broader range of clients than ever before. The question has shifted. It is no longer whether someone qualifies for a family office. It is whether the complexity of their financial life has grown past what simpler structures can hold. At J.P. Morgan, Nelson and his team help clients work through that question, then build whatever structure the answer actually requires.

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