Family Office Summit Dubai agenda

Because one of those has a governance structure, an investment committee, and a CIO. The other has strong opinions and no minutes.

The most fundamental question in any family office is not what to invest in. It is how decisions actually get made. This panel explores the spectrum between professionalised family offices that operate with institutional discipline, and the ones where the founding generation still makes every call over a family dinner and calls it consensus. Both models exist. Both have produced extraordinary results. And both have produced spectacular failures. The question is which one your family office actually is, and whether that is a conscious choice or something that just happened.

The opportunity did not disappear. The easy access to it did. That is a different problem with a different solution.

The narrative that private equity is overpriced, overcrowded, and running out of good deals is a story told most loudly by people who are not finding them. The families generating genuine returns in 2026 are doing it by going further, looking harder, and building the relationships that bring opportunities before they become auctions. Co-investments with GPs who value a fast, unconditional cheque. Lower-middle-market businesses with durable cash flows that large buyout funds cannot access at their scale. Secondaries offering entry into seasoned portfolios at attractive pricing. Direct acquisitions in sectors where the family brings operating knowledge that financial buyers simply cannot match. The deals are there. The question is whether your family office has built the access and the relationships to find them before someone else does.

If every family office is now an AI investor, who exactly is the contrarian?

What is driving renewed appetite for venture capital, and how much of it is genuine conviction versus fear of missing the AI wave? A grounded look at valuation resets, sector concentration, manager selection, and why the families generating real returns are allocating selectively and globally, well beyond Silicon Valley. The session also asks the question nobody wants to raise out loud: should family offices actually be looking outside of AI entirely, and is the contrarian position the most interesting one in the room right now?

They moved for the structure, the neutrality, and the fact that you can get a serious meeting in 48 hours.

While conflict reshapes the wider region, the UAE has quietly done what it always does. Kept the lights on, the airport busy, and the regulatory framework one step ahead of wherever capital was trying to go next. This session explores why Dubai continues to draw serious private wealth from London, Geneva, Singapore, and everywhere in between, what the DMCC framework offers that other jurisdictions cannot replicate, and whether a UAE-centric structure is genuine strategic diversification or concentration risk dressed up as safety and very good weather. Spoiler: the work is never done. But this is a very good place to start.

Every family office eventually has the same argument with itself. Usually from the same person, before and after lunch.

One of the oldest tensions in wealth management: capital preservation for the generation that built the wealth versus growth mandates for the generations inheriting it. This panel explores how to build a portfolio that keeps the founder comfortable and the next generation engaged, without either side feeling like they are funding the other’s strategy. Whether risk appetite genuinely changes across generations, or simply gets better at hiding itself in the investment committee minutes. And when preservation and growth cannot be reconciled, who wins and how that decision actually gets made. How to set an investment policy statement that works across different risk appetites, how to structure governance so that generational disagreements have a resolution mechanism before they become family disputes, and how the asset allocation needs to evolve as capital transitions across generations.

Until someone runs the numbers on what ignoring it is actually costing you. Then it gets interesting.

The UAE gives every family office in this room a structural advantage that London and New York would genuinely envy. The families capturing it fully are a small minority. This session addresses the gap: foundation structures and when they make sense versus holding company frameworks, Variable Capital Company structures and why they are becoming the vehicle of choice for diversified multi-asset portfolios, the management versus holding layer distinction, the UK control trap, UAE corporate tax which is not zero by default and is catching more family offices off guard than anyone is publicly admitting, CRS and offshore asset visibility, and what FATCA, BEPS, and global minimum tax frameworks mean for how international structures need to be built and maintained. Because every family office is different, and the structure that works brilliantly for one family creates unnecessary complexity and compliance exposure for another.

The next generation has entered the chat. Literally. And they have already read the investment memo, stress-tested the thesis, and have three follow-up questions.

The next generation has never known a stable macro environment. Their instincts were built through financial crisis, a pandemic, zero interest rates, and now regional conflict — and they have had access to the world’s most powerful information tool since they were teenagers. This panel brings NextGen principals to the table not to be observed, but to lead the conversation. What new investment paths are they carving that the previous generation would not have considered? Why are they choosing the UAE? And when Dad says “we have always done it this way” and ChatGPT says something entirely different — who is actually right?

Roads, pipes, ports, and renewable energy. Not glamorous. Remarkably difficult to argue against.

Infrastructure has delivered consistent, inflation-linked, long-duration returns through every macro environment of the last two decades. It is less discussed than private equity, venture capital, and real estate, and for many families it is the allocation that has caused the least regret. This panel addresses how to build a serious infrastructure programme, what realistic return expectations look like across core, core-plus, and value-add strategies, and how family offices are accessing the asset class through primary fund commitments, co-investments, and secondaries for those looking to build vintage diversification without the blind pool risk of a primary commitment.

Still dominant. But on points, not knockouts.

Property has dominated Middle Eastern family allocations for decades. The question in 2026 is whether that dominance reflects genuine conviction or the gravitational pull of familiarity. This panel covers yield compression, risk concentration, global exposure, and leverage assumptions, and addresses the question that tends to come up after the second coffee: if you were starting from zero today, how much of the portfolio would actually be in property? The honest answer to that question is more interesting than most investment committees are comfortable admitting.

How to stop paying for pilots that never land and start asking harder questions about who owns the outcome.

Every family office has run at least one AI pilot. Fewer can say what it actually changed. And almost none have worked out what happens when the AI gets it wrong, the vendor blames the data, the analyst says they flagged it, and the investment committee says they were never properly briefed. This panel addresses what is actually moving beyond the pilot stage into genuine operational advantage, and the harder question sitting underneath all of it: as AI, vendors, and internal teams increasingly share the work, who actually owns the outcome when something goes wrong?

It turns out uncorrelated returns were always the point. The market just needed to remind everyone why.

For most of the last decade, allocating to hedge funds felt like paying a premium for the privilege of underperforming a passive index that cost you nothing and required no quarterly calls. The two and twenty model was declared dead so many times it became a running joke. And then volatility returned, the macro environment shifted, and the funds everyone had quietly redeemed from started generating numbers that make investment committees go very quiet and very quickly change the subject. Global macro funds returned an average of 14.2% in 2022. Family office hedge fund allocation fell from 9% in 2015 to under 5% in 2022 and is now climbing back toward 7%. The conditions that made passive unbeatable have reversed. The question is whether the families that spent a decade unwinding exposure can rebuild it without arriving one cycle too late. Again.

Because doing the right thing and doing the smart thing are not always the same investment. Sometimes they are. This panel works out which is which.

Family offices are increasingly being told that clean energy is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. This panel takes that claim seriously and stress-tests it across the full energy spectrum. The conventional energy story has not ended: oil and gas assets are generating significant cash flows and institutional capital has largely exited on ESG grounds, creating opportunity for patient private capital. On the clean energy side, solar and wind have matured into genuine return-seeking investments, but the easy money is largely behind us. The next wave sits in grid infrastructure, long-duration storage, green hydrogen, and nuclear. For families in the Gulf whose wealth was built on hydrocarbons, the energy transition is not an abstract investment theme. It is a fundamental shift in the economic environment that created the family balance sheet.

Find your table. The conversations get smaller, more honest, and considerably more useful. Also the chairs are more comfortable.

Philanthropy inside family offices has undergone a quiet transformation. The era of writing cheques to causes the founder cared about and calling it a giving programme is largely over for sophisticated families. What has replaced it is more rigorous, more intentional, and considerably more interesting: impact allocation with measurable outcomes, donor-advised fund structures that optimise the tax efficiency of giving, foundation governance that applies the same discipline to charitable deployment that the investment committee applies to capital allocation, and a growing recognition that the next generation wants philanthropy integrated into the portfolio thesis from the outset, not bolted on as an afterthought.

A candid examination of what GCC private equity actually looks like in 2026. Deal flow quality, manager depth, realistic exit timelines, and how it compares to international PE. This is not a promotional conversation about the regional opportunity. It is an honest one about whether the deal flow justifies the allocation, and what to do when it does not. For families already allocated locally and those considering it for the first time, the question is the same: is the regional opportunity as compelling as it looks from the outside?

With valuations reset and selectivity returning, venture is back on family office agendas. This roundtable explores how families structure VC exposure, balance fund and direct strategies, manage vintage diversification, and align innovation capital with long-term objectives. Plus the question everyone is quietly asking: how much of the current enthusiasm is genuine AI conviction, and how much is a cycle repeating itself with better branding?

Real estate remains central to most Middle Eastern family portfolios, yet the assumptions that justified those allocations are under pressure in ways that were not fully priced three years ago. This roundtable examines where property still works, where risks are being quietly underestimated, and how families are beginning to reposition within genuinely diversified portfolios. The conversation the main stage started but did not have time to finish.

Every family office and enterprise business in this room has more technology, more vendors, and more AI capability than it did three years ago. Most also have more complexity, more versions of the truth, and a growing suspicion that the transformation budget went somewhere but the transformation did not follow. This roundtable asks the question sitting underneath every technology investment and every AI pilot that never quite landed: when the work is shared across internal teams, external partners, and autonomous systems, who actually owns the outcome when something goes wrong?

This roundtable addresses the compliance and tax conversations that keep getting deferred: CRS reporting and what genuine cross-border visibility means for how families structure ownership, UAE corporate tax and the structures that are not as protected as their owners believe, FATCA and BEPS and the global minimum tax frameworks reshaping international planning, and the practical question of how small family office teams stay across a compliance burden that is growing faster than their headcount.

A focused discussion on hard asset exposure in 2026. How much of current pricing is a genuine structural shift and how much is a conflict premium that will eventually normalise? What does the portfolio look like on the other side of that normalisation, and how are family offices positioning themselves for both scenarios rather than betting entirely on one outcome?

Private credit has attracted record capital and the quality gap between managers is widening faster than most allocators have noticed. This roundtable explores where yield is genuinely justified, how structures behave under stress, and how to assess downside protection before, rather than during, the next dislocation. The best time to stress-test a credit book was two years ago. The second best time is this afternoon.

A focused discussion on which hedge fund strategies are genuinely earning their fees in the current environment, how to assess manager skill versus factor exposure, and what a sensible hedge fund allocation looks like inside a family office portfolio that already has enough complexity. Macro, long-short, quant, and credit: where is the real alpha sitting, and how do you access it without paying for a brand name when what you actually need is a track record?

The first generation of clean energy investing has been one of the most successful allocation themes of the last decade. Solar, wind, hydropower, and biomass delivered on their promise: costs collapsed faster than anyone predicted and returns were genuine. Beyond conventional generation, the opportunity set is expanding: offshore wind, geothermal, efficient data centres redesigned around renewable energy procurement, long-duration energy storage, transmission infrastructure, and green hydrogen moving from pilot to commercial scale. This roundtable explores where family offices are building exposure across the full clean energy spectrum and what a coherent energy alternatives allocation looks like for a family office with a genuine long-term time horizon.