For professionals who work with or near family and individual wealth, dollars are rarely just dollars. Those assets may represent a lifetime of work, a family business built over generations, an inheritance received unexpectedly, or assets entrusted to someone for the benefit of others. They can provide security, create opportunity, support communities, perpetuate a family’s values—or become a source of disagreement about what wealth is for and who gets to decide.
Attorneys, trustees, wealth advisors, accountants, philanthropic advisors, and other professionals spend much of their time helping clients answer financial and legal questions: What does the governing instrument permit? What duties does the fiduciary owe? How should assets be invested? How much can prudently be distributed? What are the tax consequences? How should risk be managed?
Those questions are essential. But they are accompanied by another question, which statute, trust agreement, investment policy statement, or spreadsheet can’t necessarily answer:
What is this wealth intended to accomplish?
From Preservation to Purpose
For much of the professional wealth management conversation, success can be measured in familiar terms: preservation of capital, investment performance, tax efficiency, appropriate distributions, and orderly transfers between generations.
Those measures remain important. But they do not necessarily tell us whether wealth is accomplishing what the people connected to it intend to accomplish.
A family may successfully transfer substantial wealth to the next generation while leaving that generation poorly prepared to receive it. A trust may produce excellent investment returns but foster conflict among its beneficiaries. A charitable vehicle may make prudent annual grants without ever developing a clear understanding of the change its donors hoped to achieve. An investment portfolio may satisfy every conventional benchmark while remaining disconnected from the owner’s deeply held priorities.
None of those outcomes necessarily represents a failure in the traditional financial sense, but each raises a question about purpose. And understanding purpose can be essential to exercising superior professional judgment.
Purpose Changes the Conversation
For some families, purpose is philanthropic. Wealth creates an opportunity to address problems, support institutions, or strengthen communities that matter to them.
For others, purpose begins inside the family. Wealth may be intended to provide opportunities without discouraging independence; preserve a family enterprise without forcing participation in it; support education or entrepreneurship; maintain a shared property; or create connections among generations.
Understanding your client’s purpose does not make the financial analysis less important. In many respects, it makes it more important. Purpose without discipline can become aspiration without accountability. Impact without measurement can become a label rather than a result. And values without careful governance can produce conflict when family members disagree about which values matter—or what those values require.
The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between dollars and purpose. It is to connect them thoughtfully.
When Purpose Meets Fiduciary Duties
Fiduciaries frequently operate at the intersection of competing interests: current and future beneficiaries, preservation and distribution, financial return and risk, and individual preferences versus collective objectives. The precise legal obligations vary depending on the fiduciary relationship, but the common feature is that the professional avoid exercising sole judgment concerning client assets and interests.
A trustee administering a multigenerational trust, for example, may benefit from understanding why the trust was created and what role the settlor hoped wealth would play in the family’s life. Still, the trustee must administer the trust according to its terms and applicable fiduciary standards.
Similarly, a family seeking greater social impact through its investments still needs to understand return expectations, liquidity, concentration, time horizon, and risk. A philanthropic strategy needs not only generosity but governance, diligence, and evaluation.
Bringing Purpose Into Practice
These questions are central to the work of Avery T. Fontaine, Senior Vice President and Head of Purpose for PNC Private Bank Hawthorn. Robins Kaplan’s Wealth Planning, Administration, and Fiduciary Disputes Group is excited that Ms. Fontaine will be sharing her wisdom at its 2026 annual seminar. Ms. Fontaine leads a national team whose work brings together Philanthropy & Impact, the Institute for Family Success, and Purpose Driven Investing—an approach that considers community, personal relationships, and investments as interconnected ways families and institutions can pursue their purposes. She brings more than 20 years of experience in purpose and impact work, including helping families and institutions deploy capital in ways that reflect their values and goals. Her experience spans the spectrum: from traditional grants through hybrid approaches to grantmaking, and from private impact investing to public investment portfolios. Her background also reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the subject: She studied philosophy and fine arts as an undergraduate and later earned an MBA with a social-enterprise focus from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
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