Family Business Network (FBN)

FBN is a Swiss not-for-profit federation of national and regional family-business associations. It was founded in 1989 in Lausanne and now links 34 member associations across 65 countries. Families do not join FBN International directly: they join the member association in their country or region (FBN Asia, FBN India, FBN USA, FBN Ireland and so on) and that local membership carries international membership with it, including access to the global member directory, online forum and international events. Each member association is independently run, organises its own local programme of networking, education and peer meetings, and sets its own fee schedule. FBN International layers global communities on top of the national ones: Next Generation (NxG) for members roughly aged 18 to 40, plus Impact, Now Gen, Entrepreneurs, Family Office and Large Families groups. Governance sits with a General Assembly of member-association presidents and a board of directors. The federation's stated purpose is intergenerational learning and continuity: helping families manage the overlap between ownership, family relationships and the operating business.

How it works

Membership is bought at the national or regional member association, which runs local events, peer groups and education; that membership then unlocks FBN International's directory, online forum and global events. Membership is usually held by the family or the family company, with a principal member plus alternate, next-generation and supplementary members nominated from the family. Alongside country associations, FBN runs cross-border communities for next-generation members, family offices, entrepreneurs and large families. FBN Ireland reports roughly 750 member activities a year across the network.

Typical member

Members are individuals from families that own and control an operating business that has reached at least the second generation of family ownership, management or involvement. Membership is typically taken out in the name of the family or family company and then extends to family members including spouses and next-generation members from age 18.

FBN's federated design is its defining feature and its main source of confusion. There is no single application, no single fee and no single set of published criteria: the terms you get depend entirely on which member association you approach. FBN Asia publishes its schedule openly (SGD 7,000 for family membership, SGD 3,500 individual, SGD 2,000 next-gen), which makes it a useful benchmark, but nothing suggests those figures travel to Europe or the Americas. The published eligibility tests are qualitative rather than numeric (control of strategic direction, controlling ownership, at least second-generation involvement), so there is no revenue or wealth threshold to clear. Headline membership figures vary between FBN's own homepage, its About page and its national sites, which argues for treating all of them as approximate. The network suits multi-generational owning families looking for peers with the same succession problems; it is not aimed at first-generation founders, and advisers are not the audience.

Editorial analysis by Peer Group Guide editors. It is separated from the record above and follows the editorial policy.