What is the wealth for?

An estimated $83 trillion will pass between generations over the next two decades.

This enormous number is often repeated, but what rarely gets asked is what is actually being handed down, and to what end? Family offices sit at the frontline of navigating these questions, and many are thinking beyond financial returns. A purpose-driven cohort of next generation wealth holders want their capital to have an impact.

Yet the infrastructure to credibly assess impact exists only in fragments, and little of it connected to the point where capital is allocated. Addressing this gap can ensure a family passes down not just its financial wealth, but its answer to what the wealth is for.

Family wealth pioneer Jay Hughes is a good place to start. His central insight is that wealth in its original sense means well-being, and that a family's true wealth extends well beyond dollars.

Alongside financial capital he counts four other forms of capital: human, intellectual, social, and spiritual: the capability, knowledge, relationships, and shared sense of purpose that decide whether a family flourishes.

A family office sits closer to the question 'what is the wealth for?' than almost any other institution. The people who steward capital, decide what to do with it, and who it is ultimately for tend to be the same, or close enough to sit around one table.

Almost everything about how wealth is managed and passed on is designed to service only financial capital. And while financial wealth is the most visible part of what a family has built, it is rarely the most important, and often the most straightforward to pass on.

Besides, a family does not only pass on its capital. It passes on the world that capital helped shape, to people who will live in it and, in time, lead with it.

A rising generation of wealth holders are as focused on deploying capital with purpose as they are on preserving the estate. They are not asking what the wealth is worth. They are asking what it is for. And they are asking it at the dinner table, and in the boardroom.

Hughes' Five Capitals measure whether the family itself flourishes, but the question stretches beyond the family.

A fortune is always built on something: a community, a trade, a stable society, a living world that kept producing while the wealth compounded. Where the five capitals ask whether the family flourishes, the next generation is asking something wider: is our world at large flourishing?

Many families attempt to enshrine their answer in a charter. But the hard part is getting the capital to move in the direction that document describes, so that what a family says and what it funds are recognisably the same thing.

Knowing what the wealth is for, in other words, does not necessarily make it easier to decide where the money should go. It is harder still to credibly measure whether the capital did achieve its purpose, for the benefit of people and places it may never meet. And the market does not make it easy.

The vocabulary of purposeful investment (words like 'impact', 'sustainability' and 'ESG') is loosely drawn and inconsistently applied, as though these words all point to the same thing, when they do not.

For specific outcomes a family is trying to fund, there are often no shared definitions, no uniform consensus on how to compare one claim of impact against another, and no mechanism (for a family or for the adviser sitting alongside them) to independently verify what is actually being funded.

And even where quality opportunities exist, they are scattered and intermediated, visible only to those in the right networks. An adviser's position is harder than it looks. They know their client's values but are often shown opportunities with impact they cannot independently assess and have no efficient basis to recommend or decline them with confidence.

As a result, the path of least resistance is to stay with established managers and conventional allocations, and the answer to 'what is the wealth for?' rarely changes the portfolio.

But the next generation is noticing. In a recent Capgemini survey, 81% of next-generation inheritors said they intend to change their parents' wealth managers, and tellingly, almost none cite investment performance.

Put simply, the problem is not a lack of purpose. It is that the market offers few reliable ways to test whether an investment serves it. That test starts with trust. There is no shortage of labels or frameworks. What the market lacks is trusted infrastructure for impact credibility: a structured means to assess an opportunity and whether its claims hold up under scrutiny.

With that in place, families and their advisers can judge alignment for themselves, and allocate toward the outcomes they care about.

Building that kind of infrastructure is hard, which is part of why so few have tried. But build it and something larger becomes possible - this is the rationale behind ImpactX Markets.

The family office may be the most patient, most aligned, and most values-proximate investor in the market. It has no external stakeholders to appease, no quarterly earnings to defend, and at its best, a multi-generational horizon that matches the timescale of the problems most worth solving.

If that capital could move with the conviction its owners already carry, the effect would reach well beyond any single family's balance sheet.

Money has always been the simplest element of a family's wealth. What it is ultimately for is the harder question.

A family that can answer that question, and put its capital behind the answer, is not merely investing - it is choosing what kind of world to leave behind.