Family offices occupy a unique position as part of a family’s long-term legacy – responsible for preservation of the family’s history while playing an active role in shaping the family’s future.

Catherine Fankhauser

Partner, Family Office Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP

Passionate about working with family offices to navigate organizational change. Third generation of a private family business. Girl mom and enthusiastic cook.

Catherine is a sought-after thought leader to family offices, supporting them to take a long-term view to protect, grow and improve to achieve a family’s legacy.

Catherine supports families’ legacies by enabling their family office operations and governance to be scalable and aligned with a long-term view.

As a partner in the EY US Family Office Advisory Services practice, Catherine has worked with single family offices and their principals on the full design and setup of family offices and governance bodies, technology selections and implementations, enterprise risk reviews, and administration of project management offices.

After starting her career at a Big Four public accounting firm in tax and prior to joining EY US, Catherine was employed by a private family office. She held a wide range of responsibilities, including treasury management, accounting and reporting, deal modeling, tax compliance and shareholder services.

She has a BBA in Accounting and a Master of Taxation, both from Baylor University. She is a licensed CPA in the state of Texas.

How Catherine is building a better working world

“In my work with family offices, I find paths forward. Family offices are constantly faced with new and interesting challenges, often more than one at once. My role is to identify options and then develop roadmaps for people, technology, data and operations. The key is to ensure that any plan fails on paper first, appropriately sequence key activities and create capacity where needed so that the office can accomplish its goals.”

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