Boston’s Silver Bridge Advisors is a wealth management office specializing in advising extended families how to build wealth, including educating future generations how to keep that wealth intact. It’s a good time for offices like his, says COO Stephen Prostano. Silver Bridge is in a sweet spot as a boutique firm, sitting between large management firms on one end, and the single-family “office” on the other – essentially a family’s personal assemblage of lawyers, accountants and investment advisors. Silver Bridge, a subsidiary of Boston law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, aims to specialize in teaching all family members how to get a handle on their finances.

Stephen E. Prostano

Title: President, COO of Silver Bridge Advisors; Boston

Age: 52

Experience: 28 Years

What kind of services does a “multifamily office” deal in?

It includes all the services from [investment and wealth management firms], but adds things like family education, governance, strategic philanthropy, lifestyle services. There may be a lot in the tax, accounting, bill-pay area, so what you’re doing is trying to simplify the lives of wealthy families whose lives have become extremely complicated, in part due to their wealth. The services can be used typically on an a la carte basis, but there are a number of families that on occasion set up their own family office and hire people, individuals, to actually perform those services, or they leverage a multifamily office, which is where we kind of fall in the spectrum of service providers.

So a lot of that is handling inheritance issues and keeping money in the family?

There’s an expression, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” So sustaining wealth over the lifetime of the multiple generations in the family is a priority.

I was always curious about that expression. It indicates that succeeding generations blow through their family money, but I always assumed that once you’re rich and investing, that money has a nice, self-sustaining quality to it.

Very often there’s a generation … that somehow comes into the wealth. Typically wealthy families have very complex lives, even in the context of how you raise your children, and how you instill in them the same work ethic, as an example, when they have, you know, excessive resources available to them.

So, to put it very baldly, how to keep them from becoming spoiled rich kids who tank the family money?

[laughs] Maybe it’s those individuals that just don’t have the work ethic, but continue to spend at a level that depletes the assets in the family. And if you think of that, just progressing generation to generation, I think that’s what it more or less boils down to.

So Silver Bridge tries to make these younger generations realize, ‘hey, your money isn’t infinite, and you do need to be careful?’

Exactly. So one of our cornerstones that we believe Silver Bridge stands for is education, and it is family education. And couple that with some additional things we provide in terms of ongoing communication, and I’m talking about through a variety of media, we have a technology and reporting capability that allows a family to look at their entire net worth at a glance. And all three of those things – education, communication, information – what we hope to really be providing them is the ability to make better-informed decisions, because they have the knowledge now and the information to make critical decisions in their life effectively.

So how early do they start educating their kids on this stuff?

We are building out a curriculum that will help even the youngest child. So for example, we had a next generation “Raising Financially Thoughtful Children” panel, which was a panel of some pretty significant experts and people from Silver Bridge that talked about educating your children in the philanthropic context.

How many offices do multi-family advising in this way?

Each one kind of is a different flavor. … Many of the large financial service companies that have resources, and you can name the largest names, they will have a segment of their business that offers this broad set of services.

The issue today with many of the financial service companies, from a client’s perspective, is a lack of objectivity. It’s kind of a good time for boutiques that offer these services … We’re independent. We’re owner-managed, so our key employees and the management have an equity stake in the business, but we’re also affiliated with a very well capitalized, large, non-financial service company [law firm WilmerHale] as a parent …Our law firm, our parent, they don’t have any products to sell to the client. [Financial services companies] have many different parts of the company, products and services, that the company overall benefits from if they sell more to their existing client base. And we don’t have that here.

A family that’s very successful and wealthy has an interest in objective advice, regardless of what discipline we’re talking about. So if it’s on the investment side, we don’t want you, YXZ financial services company, to just be giving me all of your internal products.

Stephen Prostano’s 5 Big Career Moves: 

• Started as a tax attorney nearly 30 years ago, before “wealth management” had been coined as an industry term.
• Originally in financial and tax planning for wealthy families for professional services firm KPMG in Boston.
• Built a consulting practice in private banking in the late 1980s and 90s.
• Worked for Chase Manhattan Bank, part of JP Morgan, to run their global asset management business.
• About the time “family offices” were rising in prominence, Prostano moved to work for Boston-based management firm Atlantic Trust, and then Silver Bridge.