It is the most quoted statistic in private wealth. Walk into any family office conference, advisory pitch or succession seminar and, within minutes, someone will produce it: 70% of family wealth is gone by the second generation, and 90% by the third. It is repeated so often, and with such confidence, that it has hardened into law.
There is only one problem. It isn't true.
The figure traces back to a single 1987 study by the consultant John Ward, who tracked roughly 200 manufacturing businesses in one American state and measured how many remained under the same family's ownership. It was never a study of wealth, of investment returns, or of governance. As the CFA Institute and a growing body of researchers now argue, the "third-generation curse" is closer to a statistical myth - the inverse of one continuity rate, dressed up as destiny.
The real gap is governance
For Colleen Ferrary, that distinction is the whole game. She does not dispute that wealth is fragile across generations. She disputes the idea that it is fragile by fate.
The families that lose control, her work suggests, rarely lose it to markets. They lose it to a quieter, more measurable failure: a succession plan that never survives contact with reality, a next generation that was never genuinely made ready to lead, and advisors who are paid for activity rather than held accountable for outcomes. None of that is a curse. All of it can be measured - and designed around.
That is the subject she will bring to the stage in Barcelona, in a talk titled "The Governance Gap: what the data reveal about succession, leadership readiness, and advisor accountability in the family office."
A builder, not a theorist
Ferrary is the founder and chief executive of Peak Fractional, a firm that embeds fractional operators and advisory teams inside private equity, venture and family office portfolios to accelerate value creation. The premise is deliberately unglamorous: the right operator, deployed at the right moment, changes outcomes more reliably than any forecast.
She brings the operating record to back it. Over more than two decades she has led teams of over 5,000 people and carried profit-and-loss responsibility north of $500 million across Fortune 500 enterprises, mergers and acquisitions, and multiple company exits. She began her career at Target before serving as president of Small Business USA, where she oversaw the acquisition and growth of several companies. She is LEAN-certified and a graduate of MIT Sloan's programme in AI integration and business strategy - a pairing of operational discipline and emerging-technology fluency that maps almost exactly onto where the family office is heading. (Ferrary on LinkedIn.)
Why it belongs at THE LIVE
THE LIVE Barcelona is built for precisely this audience - family office principals, investors, founders and the advisors who serve them - and for precisely this kind of conversation: substantive, data-led, and unafraid to retire a comfortable myth.
Ferrary's session sits at the intersection of two of the summit's pillars, Wealth and Future, and speaks to the question every principal in the room is quietly carrying: will what I have built survive the people who inherit it? The answer, she argues, is not written in a 1987 spreadsheet. It is written in governance - and governance can be built.
Colleen Ferrary joins a growing roster of confirmed voices for THE LIVE Barcelona, 26–28 October 2026. Passes are open now, and verified family offices may request an invitation until 1 September.