Private wealth

 
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Family offices: protecting and structuring your family wealth
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Helping you and your family grow and protect your wealth

As a successful family business owner, you need a strategy for protecting your personal wealth and structuring it for growth. This is particularly the case within a global ecosystem characterised by increasing complexity and often duplicative tax regimes.

If you travel between, own assets in, or run businesses from a variety of jurisdictions, you require multijurisdictional solutions to your tax, regulatory and commercial issues. You need advisors who not only know all the rules—but also know how they will be applied to your unique situation.

Practical, business-focussed wealth solutions

While our global network of family business professionals includes tax and pension specialists, lawyers, corporate finance and investment consultants, they are all—first and foremost—business advisors to our private clients. Our network covers many major and emerging countries to provide you with a fast and efficient answer to your issues.

That means we provide innovative and robust advice in a practical and commercial way you’ll be able to understand. You don’t need to have a detailed knowledge of international tax law, finance or complex cross-border regulatory risk because we’ll explain these to you.

Here are some of the services we provide our high-net-worth family business clients:

  • Effective tax planning. We can help you structure the way you hold your business interests and investments to ensure you take full advantage of any reliefs, double-tax treaties and EU treaties that are available.
  • Estate and gift planning. We advise families on the sometimes emotional issue of passing on the family wealth in the most tax-advantageous way-carefully factoring in the unique gift and wealth tax and legal regime in each jurisdiction you may be involved with.
  • Family offices. We provide a full array of business services to your family offices, wherever they are located-including valuation, corporate finance, risk assurance, investment structuring and management, and of course, tax and legal services.
  • Risk management. We ensure that our clients manage their investment risks with counterparties, providing assurance over the stewardship of their assets as well as managing the tax and regulatory risks of operating in different jurisdictions. We help you sleep at night.

We invite you to contact us to learn more about our comprehensive solutions for wealthy private clients.

What makes family businesses different?

Insights from around the world

  • "It is important to teach each new generation, early on, the difference between ownership and stewardship. Ownership is a right of possession. Stewardship is a fiduciary role. It is holding the institution in 'trust for' the next generation. We feel, as a family, that this institution has been passed on to us for our care and not for us to dissipate or do what we will with it for our personal gain."

    Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, Ayala Corporation, Philippines, Founded in 1834

  • "Being both the CEO and the owner makes you constantly questioned but at the same time never questioned at all."

    Karin Bodin, Managing Director, Polarbröd, Founded in 1972.

  • "I think my staff appreciate the continuity in the business. They prefer working for a family business like ours. The openness of management to future plans and the 'all in it together' mentality binds staff to the company."

    Charles Hodgson, Managing Director, Hodgson Sealants Ltd., United Kingdom, Founded in 1968

  • "One of our main competitive advantages at Componenta, a listed family business, is the speed of decision-making as we have managed to align the interests of the owners and the managers in the decision-making process."

    Heikki Lehtonen, Managing Director, Componenta Oyj, Finland, Founded in 1918

  • "As a fifth generation member of a family in the yachtbuilding business, I believe that continuity is of invaluable importance. Our advanced custom yachts are luxury products but you really don't need glamour to compete successfully. I learned from my father how genuinely clients appreciate a down-to-earth approach and a long tradition of technical excellence."

    Alice Huisman, Managing Director, Royal Huisman Shipyard BV, The Netherlands, Founded in 1884