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Kompella Technologies

Family Office · Single & Multi-Family · $8,000–$20,000/month

The family office CTO: what the role actually is

Search for this role and you get job listings and salary surveys. Almost nobody has written down what the work is, at what point a family actually needs it, or what it should cost. This page is that.

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A family office CTO owns the technology that holds the family's financial life — consolidated reporting across entities, document and data security, custodian and manager data aggregation, and the systems that survive a key person leaving. Most family offices below roughly $500M AUM do not need a full-time CTO; they need two to four days a month of senior technical ownership. Full-time hires start around $250,000; fractional coverage runs $8,000–$20,000 per month.

The Role

Six things the job actually covers.

Not "digital transformation." These are the six domains where a family office either has an owner or has a problem it has not noticed yet.

Consolidated multi-entity reporting

One view of the whole balance sheet across trusts, holding companies, operating businesses, and personal accounts. This is the hardest technical problem in a family office and the one most often solved with a spreadsheet that only one person understands.

Document and data security

Trust deeds, share certificates, wills, valuations, and passports currently moving over personal email and consumer cloud accounts. Access control that distinguishes between a principal, a next-generation family member, the CFO, and an external advisor.

Data aggregation from custodians and managers

Pulling positions and transactions from banks, brokers, PMS providers, and GP capital-account statements — each on a different schedule, in a different format, with private-market data arriving as a PDF that nobody can parse.

Key-person continuity

Most family offices run with fewer than five people. When the person who built the spreadsheets leaves, the family loses the ability to answer basic questions about its own assets. Documenting and de-risking that is a technology problem, not just an HR one.

Platform selection and vendor management

Choosing between Addepar, Asora, Eton Solutions, Masttro, Canoe and the rest — and knowing when the honest answer is that none of them fits and a thin layer over existing tools is cheaper. Then owning the implementation so it does not stall at 60%.

AI adoption without leaking the family's data

Every family office is being pitched AI. Very few have decided what may be pasted into a chatbot, which vendors may train on their documents, or where the line sits between useful automation and an irreversible confidentiality breach.

Trigger Points

The four problems that create the role.

Nobody hires a family office CTO because technology is interesting. They hire one after one of these has gone wrong.

01

Reporting takes weeks, not days

Published benchmarks put the family office reporting cycle at up to 21 days from data collection to final presentation. By the time the pack lands, the decision it was meant to inform has already been made.

02

One person is the system

If a single employee's departure would leave the family unable to produce a consolidated position, the risk is already unacceptable. Teams of fewer than five make this the norm rather than the exception.

03

Data is spread across portals nobody reconciles

Positions in one place, private-market commitments in another, real assets in a third, and a spreadsheet that stitches them together monthly by hand.

04

Confidential documents move over unsecured channels

Personal email, WhatsApp, and consumer cloud storage carrying documents that would be catastrophic to leak — usually because no one ever specified an alternative.

The Decision

Full-time, fractional, or neither.

Complexity drives this decision more than AUM does. A $200M office with twelve entities across four jurisdictions has a harder problem than a $600M one holding three funds.

Buy software, no CTO

$15K–$60K / year

Under ~$100M AUM · single entity · liquid assets only

A reporting platform and disciplined process is genuinely enough. Hiring technical leadership here is over-engineering, and we will say so.

Fractional CTO or technical advisor

$8K–$20K / month

~$100M–$500M AUM · several entities · private markets and real assets

The common answer. Two to four days a month of senior ownership: platform selection, implementation oversight, security posture, and a documented system the family actually owns.

Full-time CTO

$250K+ base, often well above

$500M+ AUM · operating businesses · in-house investment team · direct deals

Justified when technology is continuous rather than project-shaped — in-house direct investing, proprietary analytics, an operating business inside the structure, or a multi-family office serving external clients.

If your situation is the first column, we will tell you so on the call and point you at the software. That is a shorter conversation than most people expect from a consultancy, and it is the right answer more often than the market admits.

Two Different Problems

Single-family and multi-family offices need different things.

Single-family office

Optimises for one family's structure, which means bespoke tooling is acceptable and often correct. The dominant risk is concentration: institutional knowledge sits in one or two people's heads, documentation is thin, and succession is a technical problem long before it is a legal one. Work here is mostly about making the system legible and survivable.

Multi-family office

Serves unrelated families from shared infrastructure, so hard data segregation and per-family access control matter more than bespoke fit. The platform must support several reporting conventions at once and handle onboarding and offboarding cleanly. Closer to running a small SaaS business than a back office — and it should be staffed that way.

India

Why this is arriving in India now.

India has gone from roughly 45 family offices in 2018 to more than 300, managing around $30 billion. Most were built inside an operating business — the promoter's finance team gradually took on the family's personal assets — and inherited that team's tooling along with it.

The result is a specific and very common shape: a listed-equity book at one broker, unlisted holdings tracked in a spreadsheet, real assets in a folder of scanned documents, AIF and PMS commitments reconciled by hand from PDF statements, and a family CFO who is the only person who understands how any of it connects.

Our family office work is with single-family offices in Chennai. Engagements are confidential and the families are not named.

Who You'd Be Working With

A technologist who is also a licensed fund manager.

Ganesh Kompella is Founding Partner and certified fund manager at Tykhe Ventures, running $20M across two funds including a SEBI Alternative Investment Fund Category II. He is fractional CTO to Landocs Private Equity in Tel Aviv and technical advisor to single-family offices in Chennai.

That matters here for one practical reason: a family office's technology exists to answer investment questions. Someone who reads capital-account statements and understands how a private-markets commitment actually reports will design the data model differently from someone who has only ever built software.

More on the investment practice → · Private equity CTO engagements →

FAQ

Family office technology questions.

Most do not need a full-time one. Below roughly $100M in assets with a single entity and liquid holdings, a good reporting platform and disciplined process is enough. Between roughly $100M and $500M, with multiple entities and private-market exposure, families typically need senior technical ownership two to four days a month rather than a full-time hire. Above $500M, or where there is an operating business or an in-house direct-investing team, a full-time CTO starts to make sense.
AUM is the weaker signal. Complexity is the real trigger: number of legal entities, share of assets in private markets and real assets, number of custodians and managers reporting in different formats, and whether an operating business sits inside the structure. A $200M family office with twelve entities across four jurisdictions has a harder technology problem than a $600M one holding three funds.
Full-time family office CTO compensation starts around $250,000 base in major markets and rises substantially with the size and complexity of the office. Fractional coverage runs $8,000–$20,000 per month depending on days committed and whether an implementation is underway. Project-scoped work — a platform selection, a security review, a data migration — is usually quoted as a fixed engagement over six to twelve weeks.
Yes, and conflating them is the most common mistake. An IT provider runs laptops, email, networks, and endpoint security. A family office CTO decides what systems the office should run, owns the data model behind consolidated reporting, negotiates with platform vendors, and is accountable for whether the family can answer questions about its own assets. Most family offices need both, and the IT provider usually reports into the technology decision rather than making it.
Usually the CEO or CFO of the family office, with direct access to the principal for decisions that touch confidentiality or succession. In smaller offices the reporting line is straight to the principal. What matters more than the line is that the role has authority over vendor selection — technology decisions made purely by committee tend to end in a platform nobody owns.
Engagements run under NDA, families are never named publicly, and case examples are described by structure and mandate rather than by anything identifying. On this site our family office work is described as advising single-family offices in Chennai and nothing further. Internally, the same discipline applies to the systems themselves: access is scoped per person and per entity rather than granted wholesale.
Yes, and it is usually better. The technology problems are similar enough across offices that pattern recognition compounds — someone who has run four platform selections will make a materially better fifth decision than someone doing their first. The constraint is confidentiality discipline and avoiding families with overlapping business interests, not bandwidth.
The technical problem shifts from bespoke fit to segregation and scale. A single-family office optimises for one family's structure and can accept idiosyncratic tooling. A multi-family office must enforce hard data separation between unrelated families, support several reporting conventions simultaneously, and handle client onboarding and offboarding cleanly. It is closer to running a small SaaS business than to running a family's back office.

Thirty minutes on your family office stack.

Bring the reporting problem, the platform decision, or the key-person risk you have been putting off. No deck, no pitch — three actionable recommendations whether or not we work together, including "you don't need us" if that is the honest answer.

Investing directly rather than through funds? Technical due diligence for direct investments.

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