The Hartmann Family Office
Three generations. £2.1B AUM. And a £7.2M Complexity Tax that had been hiding in plain sight for eleven years.
56×
Return on investment
6 days
Payback period
£11M+
Value unlocked — Year 1
480 hrs
Staff hours reclaimed
The Situation
Three generations. One CIO. Eleven years of accumulated fragility.
The Hartmann Family Office had operated for three generations. By the time the third generation assumed stewardship, the office employed a team of seven, managed relationships across eleven custodians and banking institutions, and ran a complex structure spanning direct real estate, private equity, listed equities, and a family operating business.
The technology infrastructure was a patchwork assembled over a decade: four reporting platforms (two deprecated but still in use), eleven custodian portals requiring daily manual login, three overlapping spreadsheet systems, and a single CIO who had personally built the reconciliation workflow over seven years. The institutional knowledge lived almost entirely in one person's head.
Monthly reporting took five working days. The Principal could not access a consolidated position view without requesting it from the operations team 48 hours in advance. Two staff members had been quietly using personal ChatGPT accounts to process document analysis — including trust deed summaries and tax correspondence.
The Complexity Tax — Itemised
* Figures based on a £2.1B AUM engagement. The 90-Day Sprint baseline model uses £1B AUM. Your figures are calculated individually in the Health Check.
Before & After — 90 Days
| Dimension | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting latency | T+14 days (manual consolidation) | 60 seconds (KaldroaBus unified feed) |
| Monthly report production | 3–5 days, 3 staff members | Automated — zero staff hours |
| Custodian portal logins | 11 separate portals, daily manual checks | 1 unified dashboard (Sovereign SFO) |
| AI governance | Staff using personal ChatGPT for document analysis | Sovereign Clean Room — zero Digital Exhaust |
| Succession readiness | Single CIO held all institutional knowledge | Fully documented — G3 Tech Keys transferred |
| Next-Gen access | No independent access or training | Fully operational — passed G3 assessment |
We had assumed the operational complexity was just the cost of running a family office of this scale. It turned out it was the cost of not having built the right architecture eleven years ago.
— Principal, Hartmann Family Office (anonymised)