Rosewood Hong Kong

The world’s 50 best hotels were named, ranked and announced at a glitzy ceremony in Les Salles du Carrousel in Paris yesterday - the top spot went to Rosewood Hong Kong for the second year running. But what makes those listed really the best, and how many of these rankings do we really need?

Formerly known as 50 Best, The 50 recognizes the world's most exceptional restaurants, bars, hotels and vineyards, all evolved from an annual list of the 50 best restaurants published by the UK’s Restaurant magazine since 2002.

The magazine, like so much print media, ceased publishing in 2011, but the annual list and its associated ceremony and party continued. The event, run by the magazine’s publisher William Reed, continued to prove so popular that the team decided to expand the rankings to bars and hotels since 2023.

“The travel world does have [several] lists and guides, and that's no bad thing,” says Rikki Tidball, managing director for events at The50. 

“There's room for everyone and the variety only enriches the conversation. It's about creating a thriving global hospitality community and fostering meaningful connections amongst talented individuals within the hospitality space. We aim to be a progressive force in the hospitality ecosystem, through our lists and surrounding content throughout the year.”

The hotel list - which actually extends beyond 50 to 100 hotels across six continents  - is far from arbitrary, Tidball says. A panel of more than 800 industry experts “including travel journalists, hoteliers and seasoned luxury travelers” vote for their favorites. 

Rikki Tidball, Managing Director for events at The50

The panel, referred to by Tidball as the “voting academy”, are “hand-selected… based on their proven expertise in the global hospitality industry, and each voter must have a clear and independent understanding of hotel experiences across a range of styles and regions”.

Each member of the academy ranks their seven favorite hotel experiences over the preceding three years, and the “resultant list is a simple computation of votes”. 

All hotels in the world are eligible to be voted for regardless of setting, facilities or number of rooms. “What constitutes best is up to our voters to decide,” she says there are just two caveats.

“It must have been open during the voting period, and it must not be planning to close shortly after we publish the results.”

Tidball bristles at any suggestion that the list may not be truly independent or that hotels might be able to buy a spot on the list. 

“The list is truly independent,” she says. “We run a strict no ‘pay-to-play’ policy’ with no costs to be listed or to be eligible for voting. 

“Hotels cannot apply or nominate themselves for inclusion, and there is no way to buy or sponsor a place. The list is determined solely by the votes of the Academy, with Deloitte acting as official independent adjudicator to ensure the integrity of the process and results.”

Tidball says a few trends stand out over recent years: “Boutique hotels continue to perform well, with intimate, design-led properties such as Hôtel du Couvent in France, Borgo Santandrea in Italy, Nihi Sumba in Indonesia, and San Ysidro Ranch in California all featuring on last year's lists.”

Popular brands on the list include Rosewood, Four Seasons, Belmond and Aman, which Tidball says is “testament to their commitment to delivering consistently high standards of excellence across their global property portfolios”.

-

The Damen Xplorer 105, an expedition-sized explorer superyacht.

There is a new “hot” destination for superyachts, and it might surprise you. It’s not the South of France, Caribbean or the Seychelles. But, Norway. 

“People are talking about Norway a lot, which is dramatic in winter but also beautifully green in summer,” says Caroline White, editor of BOAT International, the magazine sometimes referred to as the “superyacht bible".

“A crew-member I spoke to last week said four of her friends were on four different superyachts in Norway at that moment.”

White says demand for trips to Norway is being driven by growth in explorer class superyachts, which are built to be autonomous in more extreme environments like the polar ice caps while maintaining high-end luxury standards.

“Explorer superyachts are a trend that has endured and strengthened over the past few years,” White says. “Their popularity chimes with the wider societal value shift towards experiences over possessions and signals that an increasing number of people are viewing their yachts as tools with which to access incredible experiences – in the Arctic, or South Pacific perhaps – rather than as prizes to keep on show in San Tropez.

“These yachts are built to be tough, and are sometimes converted from commercial or military ships. The irony is that with their powerful lines and promise of adventure, they often steal the limelight from more polished, traditional yachts when they turn up in a Mediterranean port.”

Caroline White, editor of BOAT International.

Many of these explorer superyachts will be on display at the Monaco Yacht Show later this month. These include the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 126-meter Octopus, which is equipped with two helipads and submarine, and New Zealand’s richest man Graeme Hart’s 116-meter Multiverse, which features a swimming pool,  cinema and a spa as well as a hanger for a Bell 429 helicopter.

White, who has traveled to every edition of this marquee annual superyacht event for more than a decade, says this year’s event (which starts on 23 September) will be one of the most exciting to date, with some of the most impressive and interesting explorer yachts.

“Leviathan, Gabe Newell’s 111m will be there - it has a gaming lounge and basketball court - as well as the 102m Nixie, with a six-metre glass swimming pool suspended above its swim platform.”

However, the industry is slowing down from “a post-Covid boom” when “new clients saw the value of private, isolatable, but moveable environments”.

A total of 1,093 superyachts are in build or ordered this year, according to BOAT International’s annual global order book report, and, White says, the number of these boats built annually will settle at about 950-1,000. 

The biggest buyers are from the US, accounting for about 50% of all buyers. The rest are mostly from Europe, despite the industry trying hard to convince the Chinese superrich to take to the seas.

“Over the years I’ve heard a few brokers talk about why that's difficult – that they don’t have the leisure boating culture that Europe or the US does, they don't love the sun or swimming,” White says.

“Also in China, luxury is still understood through the lens of brands - and the most exclusive yachts are custom-made and don’t have any obvious branding.”

White, who has worked at BOAT International since 2011, admits to having rather an exciting job.

“I’ve seen the Northern Lights from a classic 35m yacht (converted from a CIA spy ship) in far western Canada; then there was the night we went to Buddha Bar in Monte-Carlo with David Gandy after the Monaco Yacht Show; or the time a kindly (but possibly foolish) helicopter pilot let me control a six-person chopper as we flew towards its mothership.”

This year’s Monaco Yacht Show could provide White with several more stories to tell.

-

Life inside a multi-family office “The 80 largest family offices in the world” Deloitte’s family business case study collection Wait, is there no such thing as a family office? Living Large: The rise—and realities—of the passion portfolio

Exit planning.

Worth reading cover-to-cover.

Deloitte Private’s Family Business Insights Series Launches

Today we launch The Fireside: A Family Business Case Study Collection, as part of Deloitte Private's Family Business Insights Series! It includes fascinating interviews with world-leading family business executives, including numerous heads of prominent families and family businesses that are 100+ years old!

“There is no such thing as a family office.”

#familyoffice #familywealth #governance #privacy #security

A family office is not fundamentally a building, headcount model, legal definition, or minimum asset threshold. It is a methodology and mindset for improving a family’s quality of life while managing the complexity that wealth can create…

More on wealth management M&A activity coming Friday.

Wealth Tech Arms Race Focuses on Infrastructure

The wealth tech arms race is increasingly being fought in the infrastructure layer.
The recent Vanguard/Altruist and now Envestnet/Vestmark transactions reinforce what we've been seeing first-hand at Briefcase - advisers (and increasingly, their clients) want more than off the shelf model portfolios…

Living Large: the finer things in life

The rise—and realities—of the passion portfolio. Meet the people turning luxury collectibles into an asset class. From Birkin bags to whiskey and sneakers, the alternative-asset niche is booming with help from asset management firms and a handful of entrepreneurial individuals - Robb Report

Henry Brandts-Giesen

Henry Brandts-Giesen knows a thing or two about the lives of wealthy families. 

Partner and Global Co-Chair of Family Office & High Net Worth at Dentons, Brandts-Giesen works as a general counsel and strategic advisor to family offices, with renowned work that spans family office design, succession, structuring, governance, residency planning, risk management, and strategic philanthropy.

He’s based in New Zealand, and while Singapore is his principal hub for consulting work, he consults globally regardless of location.

“I act as a jurisdictionally neutral architect of global wealth plans. I help families define their objectives, design the strategy and governance framework, select the right jurisdictions and advisers, and then coordinate implementation across borders.”

Being region-agnostic means he works with varying client archetypes, but he says “they are usually internationally connected families, entrepreneurs, and family offices whose assets, family members or advisers span several jurisdictions.” 

Brandts-Giesen has had a meaningful role in professionalizing the family office industry, publishing books, sitting on the board of STEP and speaking regularly at conferences. 

Yet while the industry has evolved, often the biggest obstacle he faces at work is an age old one: inertia. 

“The greatest challenge is usually not designing the plan. It is keeping the family actively engaged long enough to implement it. My consulting projects are easily displaced by urgent transactions and operational issues, while the family leader may understandably be reluctant to confront personal vulnerability, plan for incapacity or succession, or begin releasing control.”

To solve this, he says considerable emphasis on agreed timelines, clear ownership, and disciplined project governance is essential.

Rise of the Multi-Hub

Newer challenges come from the global flexibility of wealthy families, which has shifted the conversation from ‘Which is the best jurisdiction? to ‘Which jurisdictions are best for which purposes?’ 

“Financial capital, human capital, operating businesses, investments, and philanthropy do not necessarily belong in the same place,” says Brandts-Giesen. “I increasingly help families design core-and-satellite or hub-and-spoke arrangements.” 

“The home jurisdiction may remain the centre of family and operational life, while Singapore or another stable jurisdiction provides custody, structuring, regional investment access, philanthropy, or optionality. Each additional hub must have a defined function and justify the extra legal, tax, regulatory and management complexity.”

Asia is the fastest growing wealth region today, and Brandts-Giesen notes that the region will become even more important to the global wealth industry as Asian families move on from first-generation wealth.

“More family offices will formalise governance, engage the next generation, diversify beyond operating businesses and property, and build international advisory teams.

“At the same time, I expect APAC to attract more private capital from North America and Europe. As part of broader diversification strategies, many Western families are seeking not only access to growth but also jurisdictional diversification, geopolitical optionality, and exposure to new economic engines.” 

The move towards stewardship

Last week major private banks asked top law firms to reduce their bills due to AI-enabled efficiencies, and Brandts-Giesen says the technology is certainly accelerating work while also raising the standard expected of client standards. 

But for him, the most important innovation he’s noticed is “the growing recognition that wealth consists of multiple forms of capital: financial, human, intellectual, social, and spiritual.” 

“Earlier in my career, private wealth planning was dominated by technical and structural solutions. Today, the leading families are increasingly focused on purpose, governance, education, communication, philanthropy, and preparing future generations for responsibility.”

This view echoes other industry experts we’ve recently engaged with, highlighting a shift that Brandts-Giesen explains is ‘the industry slowly moving from structuring wealth to stewarding family capital.” 

Communication and trust

Through his over 20 years of experience working in wealth, something unusual that struck him is how the greatest risks to family wealth are internal rather than external. 

“Poor communication, unclear authority, unresolved family dynamics, and reluctance to discuss succession can do more damage than creditors, volatile markets, operational risks, or tax.”

“The strongest families are not necessarily those with the cleverest structures. They are the ones that learn to make decisions, communicate, and solve problems together.”

These traits are essential to avoid family disputes, which can be destructive when there are vast sums of wealth involved, though Brandts-Giesen says these rarely begin as legal problems. 

“They usually arise from unmet expectations, poor communication, perceived unfairness, or longstanding relationship dynamics. The technical issues can often be solved. Creating enough trust to navigate the human issues is much harder.”

He highlights how crucial trust is when it comes to solving some of his most challenging work, notably with succession. 

“The hardest part is helping a family leader prepare for a future in which they are no longer in complete control. 

“These are often people whose judgement, concentration and personal authority created the wealth, so asking them to contemplate incapacity, succession or shared decision-making cuts against the qualities that made them successful.”

What to read

Christine Benz’s How to Retire is a practical guide to building a fulfilling retirement, drawing on 20 lessons from experts in investing, financial planning, psychology, health, and relationships. Its central message: a successful retirement is about far more than accumulating enough money: it’s about time, purpose and relationships.

What to listen to

Why do good people do bad things with other people’s money? In this episode of The Rational Reminder Podcast, Dr. Moira Somers and Philippa Hann explore the uncomfortable ethics problem at the heart of financial services: how decent, intelligent professionals can gradually cross lines they never thought they would.

Family offices winning PE talent From tennis pro to wealth management Investing in music royalties More wealth management M&A activity Who inherits the corner office Living Large: Rolex will auction off a set of once-off Daytonas

A new family office. One rule: no private banks.

Investing in music royalties.

Investing in Music Royalties: What High-Net-Worth Investors Need to Know

David Bowie's 1997 bond issue raised US$55 million by securitising future royalty income from his music catalogue, creating an early example of intellectual property being used as an investable asset.

https://lnkd.in/eMynZtR7

Singapore’s wealthiest 50.

Eduardo Saverin tops Forbes’ Singapore’s 50 richest for 4th year, even as tech tycoons’ fortunes slide

Singapore’s tycoons saw their collective wealth remain flat at US$239 billion, unchanged from a year ago.

What do you want the next generation to remember?

#visionaryadvisor #totalfamily #greatwealthtransfer #generationalwealth #wealthadvisors

The $124 trillion wealth transfer isn’t only about the money. Emily Harper and Jessica Gibbs are already talking with younger generations who understand there may eventually be an inheritance. But the conversations they want aren’t necessarily about how many dollars they’ll receive…

Living Large: the finer things in life

Rolex to auction off four unique Daytonas this month. The set of once-off Daytonas is inspired by each of the four seasons, made from precious metal, gem-set, and, yes, there’s just one of each in the world. Proceeds from the auction will go to two charities helmed by arguably Rolex's most famous and influential testimonies: Roger Federer's Federer Foundation and Leonardo DiCaprio's re:Wild - Hodinkee

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s a16z was the most active family office in August.

You can feel a shift. Over the past few years, family offices have, on average, moved from preservation mode to growth mode. More money into alternatives, more direct deals, whether done alone or alongside other families.

But actually tracking these family office investment has always been difficult.

Single family offices only serve their own family, so they sit outside SEC investment adviser registration. They don't have to tell anyone what they buy.

The emergence of private wealth data providers like FINTRX have made it easier though.

FINTRX marketing head Rich Donnellan says, “We track family office direct investment activity using a combination of AI-driven data collection and a dedicated human research team, pulling from public filings, news, and proprietary research to link each deal back to the office's broader profile.”

Donnellan says it’s become about more than just the data, with AI changing the game.

“For our clients, it's clear they don't just want to view this data in a dashboard. They want to plug it into their own AI tools, whether that's Claude, ChatGPT, or internal models, so their teams can query it, analyze it, and act on it directly inside the workflows they already use.”

And he sees that appetite growing. “We only see this trend continuing, which makes the first part even more important: these AI tools are only as strong as the data foundation they're built on.”

Currently FINTRX tracks over 4,600 family offices globally, a figure growing by triple digits every quarter, and they have more than 41,000 private market transaction records.

With Donnellan’s help, we pulled a near-instant data report of every family office deal that FINTRX tracked in August.

​August by the numbers

August saw family offices involved in 109 deals that totaled $16.9 billion in disclosed capital. 

Follow-on rounds, i.e. money going back into companies these offices already held, made up 27% of deal count, meaning there was far more activity in pursuing new ventures.

Five of the six largest rounds included follow-on investments: Databricks ($5.0B), Hadrian Automation ($1.37B), Base Power ($1.0B), Castelion ($800M) and Form Energy ($750M).

Note these are totals raised across all investors, not the individual family office investments as this data is rather limited.

One office wrote most of the checks

Deal volume shows that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s multi family office a16z Perennial dominated the month, participating in 17 deals. These were also some of the largest rounds raised, worth $10.4 billion.

No one came close. YZi Labs, Changpeng Zhao's family office, ranked second by activity with 10 deals, but across only $42 million in total deal sizes means these were all small-checks.

Where the money went 

​From a geographic perspective, US companies drew 70 deals in rounds that totaled $15.2 billion. India was the busiest market outside the US by count, 12 deals, but at only $344 million between them. International check sizes still run far smaller.

One other trend worth flagging: financial services roll-ups.

Twelve RIA acquisitions closed in August, every one at an undisclosed price. While invisible in any dollar-ranked view, these consolidations are a very real trend. This is not a surprise. RIA consolidation has been one of the busiest corners of wealth management M&A for years, driven by private equity chasing scale and steady fee income.

It makes sense that family capital is involved. Wealth Enhancement, which closed three of August's deals, runs the classic aggregator playbook: buy smaller advisors, fold them in, repeat. Prices stay hidden because nobody has to disclose them, but that doesn't make the wave any smaller.

The Largest Deals

Family offices were involved in some significant deals last month, with the Databricks round of $5 billion far the largest. Etched, the AI-chip startup, was backed by both Thiel Capital and a16z Perennial in its latest $700 million round, and across the last four months it drew four separate family office investments.

​Zooming out 

Looking at data from the last four months shows a total of 457 deals, with a16z Perennial as the consistent outlier accounting for 81 of those, more than the next eleven offices combined.

Unsurprisingly, AI is the common theme.

It appeared on 134 deals in rounds that totaled $38.9 billion over the period, more than any other tag on either count or dollars. Aeronautics also featured in rounds totaling $19.3 billion on just ten deals, an average of almost $2 billion each. Defense and hard assets are pulling serious family capital.

Single and multi-family offices did almost the same number of deals over the four months, 224 against 227. But it took 123 single-family offices to get there, against just 74 multi-family offices. MFOs are busier per office. SFOs are a long, flat tail, most showing up once or twice.

A final thought: a16z Perennial is dominating transaction recently, so family office data should be considered with and without a16z Perennial. Strip out that one firm and the multi-family office numbers look ordinary. It flatters the whole dataset.

What to read

Daniel Schulman’s Sons of Wichita is the story of how the Koch family turned an inherited oil business into one of America’s great private fortunes, while nearly destroying itself in the process. A fascinating look at how ultra-wealthy families can use private capital, philanthropy and political networks to exert influence far beyond the balance sheet.

What to listen to

Christi Van Rite of White River Consultants joins The WealthTech Podcast to discuss why family offices so often come unstuck through fragmented information, unclear ownership and too many advisers working in silos. A useful conversation on outsourcing, choosing technology, avoiding key-person risk and building a family office operating model.

Family office Q2 boosting public equities Vanguard acquires wealthtech platform for $4B Africa’s richest man sets up Dubai family office A practical guide to implementing your IPS New KPMG US family business report Living Large: Inside Monaco’s new Mareterra development, home to a $550M penthouse

A better class of problem.

Vanguard acquires AI-forward wealthtech platform.

Vanguard Acquires Altruist for $4Bn, Tech Drives Personalized Advice

When the world's second-largest asset manager acquires an adviser technology platform for $4Bn USD, it's worth paying attention. Vanguard's acquisition of Altruist underscores a trend we've been watching and building for closely since 2023 - technology is rapidly becoming the primary way investment firms deliver more personalised, scalable and cost-effective advice.

https://lnkd.in/gyRKcQfC

Wealthy Asian families confronting new levels of complexity.

When family wealth becomes too complex to remain informal

Several family office / family business themed articles in the Business Times (with the obligatory shirtsleeves reference too)
https://bt.sg/yiwK

Shaun Parkin’s practical guide to implementing your investment policy.

Implementing Investment Policy for Family Offices

Family Office Investments. One of the biggest challenges for offices is implementing the Investment Policy. Emotion, market timing and noise makes it difficult to keep to the goal of moving the portfolio to the stated asset allocation. With that in mind, I produced an article called "A Practical Guide to Implementing Your Investment Policy".

Living Large: the finer things in life

Inside the world’s most expensive neighborhood: $550M apartments, F1 stars and billionaires. Forbes goes inside Monaco’s new 15-acre Mareterra development, where all 130 homes sold before completion and Rinat Akhmetov reportedly paid a world-record $550 million for his penthouse. The $2.3 billion project generated more than $6.6 billion in property sales and a staggering $3 billion profit for its investors, while residents include billionaires and F1 stars Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc - Forbes

SPVs are often the only way to access mega IPOs like SpaceX.

SPVs have been likened to SPACs: a money-spinner for the issuers, a minefield for investors. 

But as always, the reality is more nuanced than the headlines. So today it’s a look at Special Purpose Vehicles. The advantages, the disadvantages and how family offices should use them. 

An SPV is a simple idea: a group of investors pool their money into one entity, that entity buys a single asset, and each investor owns a slice of the vehicle rather than the asset itself. The SPV manager handles the investment and gets paid for doing so

A booming market

In recent years, they've grown in prominence. As tech titans stay private far longer, more value gets created before the IPO, and investors want a way in. Step forward the SPV. 

​The business around SPVs is booming. Precedence Research estimates the global SPV services market at $13.9bn, rising to $26.7bn by 2035. This is not capital allocated through SPVs but the business of SPVs themselves: administration, structuring, legal, tax and trustee services across financial institutions, real estate, infrastructure and PE/VC.

Why Family Offices use SPVs

You might think family offices would never need an SPV. They've got the capital. Why not go direct?

It's not so simple.

Firstly, capital isn't always enough. A family office may be well-funded, but many private behemoths are hoovering up SERIOUS money, and big-tech is often in another league. Normal check sizes won't cut it, and most families aren't writing tickets large enough to matter.

Second, a network doesn't mean it's the right network. We've seen dozens of family offices in WhatsApp and Slack groups putting out shout-outs for access to the hottest tech companies. One broker put it bluntly: "These family offices just have no idea." Having money doesn't always open the right doors.

Then there's the company's side. Powerful private companies want to keep a clean, simple cap table. They don't have time to diligence families for a mere $10M check, and they don't want to field questions from hundreds of shareholders who don't understand the business.

So everyone wants a piece of Anthropic, and the only way in is often an SPV.

The upside is real

SPVs can solve genuine problems, notably that some of the most valuable companies on earth won't let you near their cap table. 

SPVs lower the minimums. Pool capital with others and the ticket size drops. 

For the companies, SPVs can mean cleaner cap tables. The company adds one SPV instead of two hundred shareholders. That keeps them under reporting thresholds, and simplifies investor relations.

Why founders like SPVs. 

The reality is that family offices aren’t always suited to founders. A fund manager we spoke to put it bluntly: 

“The perception of these families is that they’re the shit, like I made all this money, everybody should make room for me. This is just not the way that these companies think about it. You have to think about it from a founder's perspective.”

Capital is often not enough… “everyone has money”. Unless investors can bring additional benefits beyond capital, he argued, founders can shop around. What they increasingly want is “strategic value” from investors. Clearly they want access to capital, but they also want access to connections, talent, and increasingly compute power. 

SPVs can also solve the problem of too many investors on the cap table, as well as check sizes being too small

“A $50 billion company taking a $1 million to $5 million check, it's just not worth your time and most of these families are not writing larger checks than $10 million into single names.”

Selectivity

As an investor, SPVs give you options. You pick the single asset you want. No blind-pool fund. No paying a manager to guess on your behalf.

And SPVs do useful structural work beyond investing. Risk isolation. Financing. Asset protection. Drop a project or an asset into its own entity and you ring-fence the liability.

Used well, the SPV can be useful tool for family offices.

The downside is also real

Here’s the catch: with SPVs, people frequently don't know exactly what they're buying. It looks simple on paper. In practice it's often far more complicated. And there have been some horror stories.

Fortune ran a piece in June calling the secondary market a $100 billion shadow market heading for a reckoning. Forbes went further, describing the trade in pre-IPO SpaceX and OpenAI shares as murky. 

We covered the world of secondaries recently with Diane Dupré, formerly of UBS, now at Clifton Partners. Her warnings to readers were straightforward:

“Steer clear of SPVs created by unregulated brokers with well-established presence. Always scrutinize the fee structure, and avoid deals with too many layers - or if layers do exist, make sure you fully understand the structure at each level. And always demand proof of shares.”

Fees on fees on fees

SPVs are getting a bad reputation, and it's easy to see why: they come with fee baggage.

Every link in the chain takes a cut. Upfront access fees have crept into the market. Fees are creative and expanding. Typically, there is some form of management fee and carry. 

Stack an SPV on an SPV, each charging a management fee and carry, and the math turns ugly fast.

Imagine a 10x exit on a $1M investment, but with three layers of SPVs with a standard 2/20 structure (2% management fee, 20% carry):​

Half the upside. Gone. To people you may never have met.

Distance creates market and liquidity risk. 

Fees are only part of the problem. You might buy into an SPV that owns another SPV that owns another vehicle that finally owns the shares. At every step removed from the asset, there's risk. 

SpaceX is a good example. Its IPO priced at $135 and the intra-day price surged above $200 within days. An investor holding directly could potentially have sold into that early rally, but many pre-IPO investors were several layers down an SPV chain. 

Moving shares, obtaining approvals and distributing them through those layers can take time. By July 15, barely a month after the IPO, SpaceX had fallen below its $135 IPO price. The underlying asset may be liquid, but that does not mean your investment is liquid when it matters.

Being several steps removed from the company means you also take on structural and counterparty risk at every layer. You do not own the shares; you own an interest in an entity that may own an interest in another entity that ultimately owns the shares. 

And if something goes wrong at the underlying company, your legal rights may extend only to the SPV immediately above you, not to the company whose economics you thought you were buying.

So the real question stops being "do I want to own Anthropic?" It becomes "what do I actually, legally own, and how many people sit between me and the shares?"

Transfer restrictions bite too. 

Anthropic, Anduril and OpenAI all restrict secondary transfers. An SPV can claim economic exposure to a company that doesn't recognize the ultimate owners at all. You're then relying on a chain of strangers to eventually pass the proceeds through.

And there's fraud. 

The ugly end: Fortune warns of allocations that don't exist and promoters selling shares they never had. The Linqto collapse highlighted the dangers. Investors believed they held direct stakes when they held SPV interests carrying undisclosed markups.

The company went into bankruptcy. The allegations are not proof of wrongdoing. But the mess is very real.

Money opens fewer doors than families think

The cleanest secondary allocations get offered to a small circle of trusted buyers who move fast and keep quiet. Dupré made this point clear. 

“The founders and GPs who control the best deal flow have long memories. They know which buyers kept transactions confidential and which ones didn't. They know who ran quiet processes and who shopped the deal across twenty advisors. That reputation determines who gets called first on the next opportunity.”

So a lot of families never see the direct deal. They see what's left. And what's left is often the SPV stacked on an SPV, sold by whoever was willing to sell to them.

What good diligence looks like

It all points in the same direction: Don't just diligence the company, diligence the whole chain between your money and the company.

A short SPV checklist:

• Is the manager a properly regulated adviser, with a registered broker-dealer involved? Check the records, not the pitch deck.

• Can they show a clean chain of ownership? Share certificates. Real proof the SPV holds what it claims.

• Are all the fees on the table? Commissions, management, carry, distribution. The amounts and the timing.

• How many layers are there? Every extra one adds cost and blurs ownership.

• Has the company approved the structure? Or are you exposed to a transfer it can block?

None of this is exotic. It's the discipline that separates the families who compound from the families who fund someone else's fees.

An SPV is a chain of legal promises connecting you to an asset. That chain deserves every bit as much scrutiny as the asset at the end of it.

And demand proof of shares. Every time.

By Pieter Hundersmarck.

Written by financial journalist Walter Bagehot in his 1873, the phrase "money will not manage itself" referred to the fact that financial and banking systems need a guiding hand to function properly.

The phrase can just as aptly be applied to private investment, and notably to the core question that every family office faces: do you build an investment engine of your own, or do you hire others to run capital for you? 

To build or to buy. The families who get this wrong usually make the same mistake. They assume that because they have capital and ambition, they have the right to build an investment capability.

The families who get it right start somewhere less flattering: they accept that they cannot be great at everything. Then they decide honestly if they have the edge, the resources and the patience to be excellent at one or two things. Everything else, they outsource.

This honesty is harder than it sounds, and it rests on three things.

Framing the question

Before delving into the three aspects that shape whether a family office should buy or build, it’s worth zooming out. Whether a family office decides to buy or build, there will always be a need for an investment mind in a family office. Even if they outsource their entire investment management function, a family office must have the capability in-house to query, manage, control and audit the investments made by the family.

On top of this, this individual (or team) must orchestrate and rebalance the strategic asset plan of the family, manage the flow of information and reporting, and maintain the cross generational links that shape the families’ future.  

A further aspect worth framing is cost.

Literature shows us that an in-house capability can cost less than a fully outsourced model. But it says nothing about the quality of the in-house capability. One can skip over this debate by making the reasonable assumption that should a family office succeed in being world class in a certain asset class, a small difference in costs are a secondary consideration.

A right to win, not just a right to play

Being able to fund a strategy is not the same as being able to win at it. Direct real estate, venture, private credit, public equities: each is its own profession with its own competitors who do nothing else. The real question is whether the family office has a genuine edge in the arena they are entering, or whether they are simply well capitalized enough to sit at the table.

The point is not that a family office should be timid. It is that pretending their circle of competence is wider than it is will cost them more than admitting where it ends. If a family office has a real edge, a network, an operating history or a genuinely differentiated view, then building around it is sensible. If not, outsourcing is the correct answer.

Resources to actually pursue excellence

A right to win is only theoretical until it can be funded properly. Greatness in any asset class requires a real team, real information, real infrastructure, and enough capital to be a serious counterparty. Half a team chasing a full ambition is the most expensive thing a family office can own.

David Swensen, who built one of the best in-house programs in the world at Yale, was blunt about how steep the climb is. He warned that "the efficiency of marketable security pricing poses formidable hurdles to investors pursuing active management strategies," and that most participants who try to beat the market end up losing to it by the cost of trying. 

He of all people had earned the right to make the case for building in-house, and even he framed it as a demanding, resource-intensive discipline rather than a birthright. The lesson for a family is not "don't build." It is "if you build, build to a standard that can actually win, or don't build at all."

Patience and a culture

Even a genuine edge and full resources will fail without time and a way of operating that protects it. Excellence at a certain asset class compounds slowly and rarely arrives on the schedule of an annual review. What sustains it is culture: a shared understanding of how decisions get made, how mistakes get discussed, and how the family behaves when a good strategy is having a bad year.

Seth Klarman argued that "the single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation." That edge is available to family offices in a way it is available to almost no one else. 

But that advantage is structural, not automatic. It only becomes real if the family builds the temperament and the governance to actually hold positions through discomfort. Without that culture, permanent capital quietly behaves like impatient capital, and the greatest edge that a family office owns gets thrown away.

Where this leaves a family office

Put the three together and the build-or-buy investment decision becomes a matter of self-knowledge. Having built capabilities and advised for a number of family offices, my admiration is not for the ones doing everything themselves, nor the ones who have handed it all away. It's for the ones who chose deliberately. They know exactly where their edge is, they have built the depth to defend it, and they have the patience to let it compound. 

That clarity, more than any single investment, is what tends to separate the family offices that endure from the ones that merely spend.

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Pieter Hundersmarck is a Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager with almost 20 years experience building investment capabilities for asset managers and family offices from the ground up, including asset allocation, philosophy, process, people and investment operations end to end. He was most recently CIO at a single family office based in Amsterdam, and has led investment strategies across listed equity, fund of funds, private equity and impact investments.

Partner content by Chirag Nanavati, Managing Director at Asset Vantage.

The conversation around AI in family offices often starts with what technology can do. A more useful place to start may be with what the family office already struggles to do efficiently. 

Our internal analysis of recent prospect conversations makes that gap clear. 

Multi-entity accounting and consolidation appears in an estimated 90% of conversations. Around 75% of prospects are looking to move away from spreadsheets as a system of record due to huge dependencies. Roughly 70% raise challenges around private-asset performance, while about 65% struggle with aggregating data across custodians, managers and other sources. 

AI, by comparison, is an explicit requirement in about 25% of conversations today. And it is behind some of the most common questions we hear: 

• How does AI work?  

• What can we actually do with it?  

• Where will it save time?  

• And what can we trust it to do? 

That tells us that family offices are interested in applying AI in many places, with some even trying to re-create the core financial engine itself. However, from our experience on-boarding 400+ family offices, the real value they can derive from AI solutions is grounded in reducing friction around day-to-day operational workflows. 

Consider how much work happens before a family office can answer a seemingly simple question. Statements have to be collected. Data may need to be extracted and reconciled. Information sits across entities, custodians, fund reports and spreadsheets. Someone must find the right documents, identify what changed, prepare analysis, and place it into an actionable form for a principal or advisor. 

These are exactly the kinds of workflows where AI can be useful. 

AI can help read and classify incoming statements, extract information from documents, summarize manager updates, locate supporting records, identify unusual movements, or turn a large body of portfolio information into a useful first draft of an answer. 

For an investment team, it could help surface concentration or look-through exposures that deserve attention. For a lean family office, it could remove repetitive work and help the office scale without simply adding more people. For principals, it could make complex information easier to interrogate and understand. 

Cash-flow visibility is an excellent example and features prominently in our customer and prospect conversations, particularly where private investments come with an irregular and long-term stream of capital calls and distributions.

The opportunity for AI is to make the underlying information easier to bring together, question and interpret so the family can understand upcoming liquidity needs and subsequent decisions on moving capital. 

The distinction is critical. 

Returns, valuations, ownership structures, accounting entries, and reconciliations should still come from controlled expert systems and deterministic calculations. AI engines on top of these expert systems can help navigate, interpret, and explain relationships. It should not become the source of truth itself. 

So perhaps family office teams should not begin their AI strategy by asking, “What is the most advanced thing AI can do for us?” A better question is: where do we lose the most time between having the data and being able to act on it? 

That is likely where AI will create the most immediate value for your family office.

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Chirag Nanavati is the Managing Director and part of the founding team at Asset Vantage, the financial operating system of choice for more than 400 family offices across 10+ countries, with over US$400B in assets tracked.

Powered by an integrated general ledger and advanced performance reporting, the platform delivers a complete, real-time view of assets, liabilities, and overall total wealth- enabling principals and their trusted advisors to make confident, informed decisions. 

A UNIDEL company, Asset Vantage provides a scalable, secure foundation for comprehensive wealth oversight and operational excellence.

By Jessica Parker, founder of JP Advisory.

Eighteen months after the new investment reporting platform went live, someone asks a question like: why is this bank account connected and not that one? Why was history loaded for one custodian account and not another? Why was one family member's report configured differently from another family member’s report? Why was this personal asset included and that one left out?

Everyone in the room is sure there was a good reason at the time, however no one can remember and it was not written down anywhere.

I have watched this happen, and I have caused it!

When you are the person making most of the decisions during an implementation, you carry the reasoning in your head, and it feels obvious why you made specific choices. However, 12 months pass and even you struggle to reconstruct why you did something in a particular way. The problem is made worse when that person leaves, as you are left with a platform that works but no record of why it works the way it does. 

There are two simple documents that go a long way to help this issue.

Two documents, deliberately simple

The first is a decision log. When you set an investment up a particular way, you write down the topic, the decision you made, the reason behind it, and who was involved. That is the whole thing. Why you connected one custodian feed and not another. Why you configured a report differently for two stakeholders. Why some investments carry full history and others do not.

The second is a parking lot. During any implementation, good ideas arrive that are not requirements for phase one. Better analysis you cannot build yet, a report someone would love in a year, an integration with another system that would reduce manual steps, a refinement you want to come back to. The parking lot is where those ideas live so they are not lost. Without somewhere to hold them, the ideas get forgotten, because they were only ever sitting in someone's head with no owner attached.

These documents do not need to be complex or over-engineered; simplicity is the point. The moment they become a project to maintain in their own right, they stop being kept. 

This is common in other industries

I think about operational context a lot, and one of the things that strikes me is how normal these tools are everywhere except family offices.

Ships have kept logs for centuries. A ship's log records the important events in the operation and navigation of a vessel, and when something goes wrong, investigators reach for it the way an aviation inquiry reaches for the black box. Scientists keep a lab notebook for the same reason. It is a contemporaneous record of what was done and why, detailed enough that someone else can reproduce the work, and it carries real legal weight when the question of who invented something first has to be settled. 

Software engineers formalised the same habit. In 2011, the software engineer Michael Nygard wrote a blog post called "Documenting Architecture Decisions", which introduced what is now known as the Architecture Decision Record. His argument was that large documents go unread and unmaintained, so the reasoning behind important decisions gets lost along the way. Teams then make new decisions that undo earlier ones, because no one remembers why the earlier ones were made.

His fix was a lightweight record of a single decision and its rationale, small enough that people would actually write it. The collection of those records becomes the project's decision log.

That idea translates almost directly to our world. A family office reporting platform is the accumulation of hundreds of small decisions. The decision log is the record of how it came to be the shape it is, for the specific family office that is implementing it.

The ‘hit by the bus’ strategy

When I worked inside a family office, the reason I pushed to implement investment reporting technology in the first place was what I used to call the ‘hit by the bus’ strategy. If something happened to me and the General Manager, who would hold the context of the family office operations? The answer was nobody, and that really concerned me.

Lean offices run on the knowledge in one or two heads, and while those people are there, everything works. However, when a key person does leave, a large amount of institutional knowledge often leaves with them. 

The value of these documents

The value of these two documents shows up in a few ways. 

The first is consistency. Once you have documented why you set an investment up a particular way and under what conditions, the next similar investment is easier. The reasoning is already established, and you can follow the same approach rather than solving it from scratch and hoping you remember how you did it last time.

The second is continuity. A successor inherits your reasoning alongside your configuration. Onboarding a new person to look after the system becomes a matter of reading and digesting the reasoning, rather than reverse engineering.

The third is where context has become more valuable than it used to be. Operational context has always mattered, and it matters more now, because it is what makes AI helpful to you. A well-kept decision log is the raw material an AI can use to draft an onboarding guide for a new starter, or a briefing note on how a particular investment is treated.

Think of the decision log as the knowledge centre for how the platform applies to your specific family office, sitting alongside the generic knowledge centre the vendor provides. AI needs context as much as it needs data, and this is how you give it that. 

Keeping the parking lot alive

The parking lot needs to be maintained and kept as a living document. The easiest way to do this is to assign an overall owner, as well as an owner per parked item, and revisit it at natural checkpoints, for example the next phase of work or the annual review.

Priorities change over time, and so does the technology, both the vendor platform and the rest of the family office's tech stack. This review allows you to continue to determine if the items in the parking lot are still relevant, and how each item should be prioritised.

A role for vendors

I have been on the family office side implementing the platform, and on the vendor side as a solutions consultant helping other offices set theirs up, and I think vendors have something to gain here too.

A simple decision log and parking lot template, handed over at onboarding with ten minutes spent explaining why they matter, would cost a vendor almost nothing. However it supports a successful implementation over the long term, which is in the interests of the vendor as much as it is for the family office.

Two plain documents, kept from the first day. The topic, the decision, the reason, and who contributed to the decision. Simple enough to survive contact with a busy office, which is the only kind of documentation that ever does!

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Jessica Parker is the founder of JP Advisory, providing independent technology and operational advisory services to family offices. She has worked inside single family offices, on the vendor side as a Solutions Architect, and now as an independent advisor.

By Hannah Arrighi.

For families looking to become AI-enabled, an accessible solution is often a tech stack that integrates cutting-edge AI models with existing software. This allows the family to query and access information across platforms in real time.

Novum Partners, a $10B AUM multi-family office based in Geneva, Switzerland, is evolving into an AI-enabled office using this approach. To begin, they consolidated data from various sources – Excel files, Bloomberg data, Reuters data, their CRM, their portfolio analytics platform, Guardian, and others – and created a database from scratch.

Their AI layer, Nova, sits on top of that unified database. While OpenAI was the engine that built Nova, the data itself is stored in a private, secure, internal cloud environment; data queries use API tokens with strict protections baked into the OpenAI contract, not the consumer model most people are accustomed to. Only relevant slivers of data get processed by the LLM. None of the data is used to train external AI models.

Addepar, widely regarded as best-in-class portfolio management software, is using a similar structure for its AI, Addison: it stores data on a secure cloud-based platform (using Databricks and AWS) and overlays its AI platform on top.

Like Nova, Addison can query the portfolio to show a client’s performance, exposure, asset class distribution, cash position, risk profile, and more. It can connect news articles to potential impacts on a portfolio. And, compellingly, Addison now integrates a “show your work” feature.

According to Addepar’s Head of AI, Kunal Gosar, “The AI is going to give you the nice high-level summarized approach, and the show-your-work functionality provides the underlying rationale for how it got there. We’ve seen a ton of interest and excitement around that feature because that’s what makes the AI trustworthy.”

Like Novum, a family office could integrate its own AI on top of tech software like Addepar across performance reporting, accounting, governance, and more. One of Novum’s senior bankers, Maria Mavridoglou, reflects that this significantly reduces the time needed for reconciliation and customized report generation. “In the past, the process would have been completely ad hoc and required six or seven people pulling spreadsheets together and doing manual SQL programming,” she states. “Now, it is instantly ready for review.”

However, as Gabriele Gallotti, the founder and CEO of Novum notes, “AI won’t be the miracle or hand coming down from the sky to save your business. That’s probably the hope of many, but I think that’s just a big illusion.” AI is only as good as the humans who run it. Novum has spent years crafting Nova to produce quality outputs, and it took ample dedication and resources to build a system that works.

Salash Motiani, a next-generation family office principal, has also put considerable thought and energy into his family’s use of AI. In his case, he used multiple LLMs to build his system; he deployed Claude, Cursor’s Composer, and others to create his AI workflows.

Most of his data is secured in the cloud, where the bulk of his AI system operates. However, he requires massive computational power for AI agent stock and algorithmic trading, which exceeds what the cloud can efficiently provide. Motiani thus has a dual cloud and on-premise system.

He switches between developer models opportunistically; if DeepSeek has a discount, he uses DeepSeek instead of Claude or OpenAI. For live queries, he tries to pass data relationships to the LLMs rather than the data itself – metadata rather than data. In addition, he’s architected the system so no single LLM has a monopoly on his queries. This means that none have enough information to piece together his big picture, leaving the LLMs “very disabled” by design.

He likens proper use of AI to baking – “You can use Claude, you can use Composer, you can use a DeepSeek. They all basically pick up the ingredients you give them and start cooking. So let’s say you want a cake. What we’ve done is we’ve basically given AI the direction that we need to make a cake. We’ve gone ahead and given it the ingredients also. We’ve given it the saucepans also. So, we try to give it enough things, and we simply say, now that you have everything, can you put it into a mix and get on with it? When you give it that clarity, what’s the worst it can do?

Well, even with careful instructions, someone could forget to turn the stove off and accidentally set the whole house on fire. But the better the supervision in the kitchen, the less likely that will happen.

With AI agents in particular, families need a dedicated CTO or tech team to oversee them effectively. Otherwise, the system is at risk – data could be exposed when agents interface with counterparties, or data could simply be compromised internally.

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Hannah Arrighi is alumni Co-Chair of Oxford's Family Business & Office Circle and Vice President at Center15 Capital, a growth-stage investment firm backing companies that advance American national interests. She also founded the financial services communications firm, Élever Partners.

Note: this article was originally part of a longer piece titled AI in the Family Office.

Wealthy families disclose SpaceX holdings Vanderbilt heir builds new family office Day trade your way to $4.6 billion A family-owned football club takes a unique approach Governance should translate vision into purpose Living Large: AI is taking wine apps to new levels

Everything is relative. Or is it?

Family offices shouldn’t try invent a structure.

Family Office Structure: Copy from Private Equity Funds

A family office is, at its core, an investment company. The most successful investment companies in the world - private equity funds, hedge funds - already figured out how to structure one, refined over decades in competitive markets. Family offices do not need to invent a structure. They need to copy one.

Philanthropy engages the next-gen and strengthens family cohesiveness.

Family Philanthropy Boosts Family Values and Cohesiveness

Philanthropy is becoming less about writing a cheque and part of how families think about the purpose of their wealth…

A family-owned football club with a unique approach.

Como 1907 – who open their competitive domestic campaign…

Como 1907 – who open their competitive domestic campaign tomorrow – will soon make their Champions League debut, having finished fourth in Serie A last season, ahead of AC Milan and Juventus. Not bad for a team that was in Serie D when Indonesian billionaire brothers Robert and Michael Hartono acquired it in 2019…

Living Large: the finer things in life

Wine apps and AI, the new way to manage your cellar. Wine management apps help offset the not insignificant work of storing and cataloging large wine collections. These days they also do a whole lot more, with new apps capable of things like 3-D modeling your cellar- Robb Report

Miami feels like the hottest place for family offices right now.

A recent New York Times article highlighted how the family offices for Peter Thiel, Mohamed Mansour and Tom Brady were leasing office space in Miami and breaking rental records in the process.

They join other high-profile billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Ken Griffin, who have either relocated or purchased homes there. Griffin recently made the news for acquiring an entire 138-condo Miami apartment building. 

Such notable real estate activity reflects Miami’s emergence as a wealth hub, as it attracts family offices as well as the growing number of private banks, tax specialists and legal advisors that service them.

But will “Wall Street South” challenge stalwarts like New York as a primary wealth hub though?

Joe Roos, Chief Investment Officer at Zittman Family Office, believes Miami has evolved from an emerging ecosystem to a credible alternative for sophisticated family office capital.

“The pro-business mandate and compelling tax environment serve as the foundation, but the peer network, deal flow quality, service provider infrastructure, and talent pool have vastly improved over the past five to ten years.”

He adds its location offers a notable strategic advantage. 

“Miami is the only major US domestic financial center that serves as a gateway to Latin America while also serving as a hub for capital flows from Europe and the Middle East, which creates a unique dynamic for family offices with global investment mandates or international operating businesses.”

The family office has specifically benefited from him being based there, notably from an investment perspective.

“ZFO tends to invest thematically by identifying durable competitive themes that we think will persist for at least the next decade, many of which offer some form of regulatory arbitrage opportunity.”

“We have been able to develop a robust family office and deal flow network across many of these themes, e.g. quantum, nuclear, fintech, crypto, space, biotech, etc., where Miami sits at the forefront of innovation.”

Roos does admit that while the increasing presence of notable billionaires reflects Miami’s attractiveness, there are still gaps in its family office ecosystem.

“While Miami continues to attract and retain talent across bankers, lawyers, private equity professionals, venture capitalists, etc. the ecosystem still needs to develop a deeper bench of family office talent to support the massive wealth migration to the region.”

Services in demand

Benjamin Vaschetti, from Miami-based family office concierge service Maison Benjamin, says the change in Miami over the past few years has been clearly visible.

“You can see it in the volume of luxury residential transactions, the demand for private schools, the expansion of private banks and wealth-management firms, and the number of financial and professional-services companies establishing offices here.”

“What I find most significant is that these families are not simply purchasing a second home. Many are making Miami a genuine base—relocating their families, opening offices and building local advisory teams.”

This has brought major benefits for Maison Benjamin, as demand for trusted, local partners increases.

“More Miami-based families and family offices now rely on us as their ‘on-the-ground’ agency, particularly around major events such as Miami Art Week and the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix. Being based here allows us to facilitate access, coordinate hospitality and transportation, and respond quickly when requests or plans change at the last minute.”

Aside from providing access, Maison Benjamin has seen growing demand for services stemming from Miami being a natural gateway between North America, Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We regularly source properties and experiences within a two- or three-hour flight across the Caribbean, particularly for family gatherings, multigenerational travel and private wellness retreats.”

“For multi-family offices with Latin American clients, we also receive requests for relocation support, particularly when a family is looking for a condominium, winter residence or secondary home in Miami.”

Lifestyle is just one reason wealthy families are attracted to Miami.

Riding the momentum

Tax advantages, like zero state-level income or estate tax, combined with the vibrant Miami lifestyle are compelling attractions for wealthy families, but its emergence as a genuine family office hub has become another.

Roos notes there is still some way to go though.

“Miami needs to continue to develop a stronger institutional quality private market ecosystem and trusted collaborative network amongst single family offices allocating to directs. The ecosystem needs fewer family office conferences and more intimate gatherings where there are ten family offices sitting around a table with common values and investment mandates.”

While the headlines are on Miami’s momentum and influx of professionals, Roos says family offices should still exercise caution when it comes to hiring, with emphasis on talent they can retain for at least a decade given the dynamics of family offices.

His advice for those considering setting up an office there is simple: “Start slowly and hire slower.”

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Miami: Facts & Figures, Pros & Cons

The Basics

• Population: ~2.8 million in Miami-Dade County; ~6.4 million across the wider Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach metro area. (Miami-Dade County)

• GDP: Miami-Dade County GDP was approximately $261 billion in 2024. The wider South Florida economy is considerably larger. (FRED)

• Main Industries: Financial services, real estate, tourism & hospitality, international trade, logistics, healthcare and increasingly tech/private capital.

• Wealth: Miami is home to around 38,800 resident millionaires and 180 centi-millionaires with $100m+ in liquid investable wealth. Its millionaire population grew 94% between 2014 and 2024. (Henley & Partners)

• International Population: Miami is about as international as America gets. 54.5% of Miami-Dade residents are foreign-born, while more than 70% identify as Hispanic or Latino. (Census.gov)

• Languages: English and Spanish dominate. In practice, being bilingual is a major advantage in business.

• Time Zone: Eastern Time, the same as New York.

• Transport: Miami International handled more than 55 million passengers in 2025 and currently serves more than 100 international destinations. It is particularly strong for Latin America and the Caribbean. (Miami International Airport)

• Private Aviation: Excellent infrastructure for private aviation, alongside one of the largest international airports in the US.

Tax

Miami's biggest financial selling point: Florida.

It gives you many of the advantages of living in the United States without the state income-tax bill that comes with New York or California.

✅ No Florida personal income tax
✅ No Florida tax on individual capital gains
✅ No Florida estate tax for modern estates (Florida Dept. of Revenue)
✅ No state inheritance tax
✅ No state wealth tax
✅ No Miami city income tax
✅ Florida corporate income tax is 5.5% for corporations within its scope. (Florida Dept. of Revenue)

For a founder selling a business, hedge fund manager receiving carried interest or family with a large investment portfolio, moving from a high-tax state can therefore make an enormous difference.

But there is a very large asterisk: Miami is not Dubai.

You are still in the United States. Federal income tax, capital gains tax, estate and gift tax rules remain relevant. And this is particularly important for international families. A foreign national who becomes a US tax resident under the Green Card Test or Substantial Presence Test can become taxable in the US on worldwide income. (IRS)

So for an American moving from Manhattan to Miami, the tax story can be spectacular.
For a billionaire moving from Monaco, Dubai or Switzerland?

Get advice first.

Many internationally mobile families therefore use Miami as an operational or lifestyle base while maintaining trusts, holding companies and investment structures elsewhere.

And if you're claiming to have moved from New York or California, actually move. A Florida driver's licence and a condo you visit occasionally are not the same thing as genuinely changing domicile.

Bottom line: Miami isn't a tax haven. It is a highly tax-efficient place to live by US standards.

Lifestyle

There are worse places to manage a billion dollars. Miami combines big-city energy with resort living in a way few financial centers can match.

• Year-round warm weather

• ️Beach lifestyle on your doorstep

• One of America's biggest boating and yachting scenes

• Exploding restaurant and private-club scene

• Art Basel and a major contemporary-art ecosystem

• Formula 1, Miami Open, NBA, NFL and major sporting events

• Strong private and international schools

• High-quality private healthcare

• Easy access to New York, the Caribbean and Latin America

Brickell has become the financial centre: glass towers, private banks, investment firms and expensive restaurants.

Miami Beach provides the other half of the equation: waterfront homes, hotels, restaurants, clubs and an increasingly extraordinary concentration of wealth.

Miami also feels genuinely international. Spanish is heard everywhere and the city's deep ties to Latin America mean it often feels more like a global capital than a conventional American city. That is a major advantage for Latin American families who want access to the US while remaining culturally and geographically close to home.

The downside?

Summer is seriously hot and humid. Traffic can be painful. Hurricanes are real. And prime property is no longer remotely cheap. Miami Beach now features among the world's most expensive luxury residential markets. (Henley & Partners)

But if your ideal working day ends with dinner overlooking the ocean rather than a commute home through sleet, Miami makes a strong case.

The Family Office Scene

Miami's family office story is really part of something bigger: the rise of “Wall Street South.”

What started as a pandemic-era migration has developed into a genuine shift in the geography of American wealth.

Families, hedge funds, private equity executives, entrepreneurs and asset managers have moved south from New York, California and Chicago. Bloomberg has documented the growing migration of financial firms to South Florida, accelerated by the relocation of Citadel and Citadel Securities. (Bloomberg)

And where wealthy principals go, the infrastructure follows. Miami now has an increasingly deep ecosystem of:

• Single-family and multi-family offices

• Private banks and UHNW wealth managers

• Private equity, venture capital and hedge funds

• Trust, estate and tax lawyers

• Big Four and specialist tax advisers

• Fund administrators and outsourced family office providers

• Real estate investment firms

• Cross-border specialists focused on Latin American families

There is no definitive public count of Miami family offices (which is partly the point with family offices) but specialist database Altss estimates there were 347 Florida-based family offices by June 2026, with continued migration from New York. Treat the exact number cautiously, but the direction of travel is clear. (Altss)

The family office mix is also unusual. Miami sits at the intersection of several different pools of wealth:

• American wealth relocating from higher-tax states

• Latin American wealth using Miami as its natural US gateway

• Real estate wealth, which has always been deeply embedded in South Florida

• New-economy wealth from tech, crypto, venture capital and financial services

That creates a much more entrepreneurial FO community than you might find in some traditional private-banking centres. And Miami increasingly isn't just where the principal lives while the investment team remains in New York, the investment teams are moving too.

The SEC position is relatively family-office friendly for genuine SFOs: a qualifying family office can fall outside the Investment Advisers Act where it advises only family clients, is wholly owned by family clients and controlled by family members/family entities, and does not hold itself out publicly as an investment adviser. (Securities and Exchange Commission)

Once you start taking external money or serving multiple unrelated families, however, the regulatory picture changes considerably.

Miami therefore works particularly well for entrepreneurial SFOs that want access to US capital markets and deal flow without paying New York taxes, and for Latin American families wanting a sophisticated US base.

The ecosystem still doesn't have the institutional depth of New York, but that gap is closing. Fast.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• No state personal income tax

• No state capital gains tax for individuals

• No state estate or wealth tax

• One of the fastest-growing concentrations of private wealth in the world — Miami's millionaire population rose 94% in a decade. (Henley & Partners)

• Rapidly expanding family office and private-capital ecosystem

• Gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean

• Same time zone and easy connectivity to New York

• Exceptionally international and bilingual talent pool

• World-class lifestyle, restaurants, sport and entertainment

• Strong private banking, legal, tax and wealth-management infrastructure

• US legal system and access to the world's deepest capital markets

• Excellent location for principals who want residence, office and investment network in the same place

Cons:

• Federal taxes still apply, Miami is tax-efficient, not tax-free

• Potentially unattractive for non-US families who accidentally trigger US tax residency and worldwide taxation (IRS)

• Prime real estate has become extremely expensive

• Hurricanes, flooding and rising property-insurance costs are genuine considerations

• ️Hot, humid summers aren't for everyone

• ️Traffic and public transport lag New York, London or Singapore

• ️The institutional talent pool is improving quickly but remains shallower than New York's

• US compliance can be heavy, tax reporting, securities regulation, AML and cross-border structuring all require proper advice

• Miami can be style over substance. Separating serious operators from the yacht-and-Instagram crowd takes some work.

The biggest attraction?

You can combine a serious US financial centre, zero state income tax, Latin American connectivity and a world-class lifestyle in one place.

The biggest drawback?

It is still America, with the federal tax and regulatory system that comes with it. For US families, that trade can be extremely compelling. For international families, the calculation is much more nuanced.

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Dr Clarisse Lafleur advises on next-gen engagement and succession.

By Dr Clarisse Lafleur, family office governance and next-gen engagement advisor.

For much of my life, I thought my father didn't want me to be involved in the family business.

He never actually said that. In fact, he encouraged my brother and I to study and pursue our own ambitions and build careers that were meaningful to us. There was never any pressure to follow in his footsteps.

Looking back, I realise I confused freedom with distance.

Because we rarely spoke about the business, I assumed it wasn't something he wanted to share. I was fascinated by what he had built, but I wasn't sure where I fitted into it. Like many members of the next generation, I had questions, but I didn't always know how, or even whether, to ask them.

At the time, I thought that uncertainty was unique to me. Years later, I realised it wasn't.

I grew up in a multi-generational business family in New Caledonia. My father built a successful group of businesses, continuing the entrepreneurial legacy established by my grandfather, Jacques Lafleur. While he is remembered by many for the role he played in helping negotiate the Matignon Accords in 1988 and bringing an end to years of violent conflict in New Caledonia, to me he was simply my grandfather.

Growing up in that environment meant I was surrounded by conversations about leadership, responsibility and building something that would endure. Yet, despite that exposure, I remained curious about what happened behind the scenes. I wanted to understand not only how businesses were built, but how families sustained them across generations.

Those questions stayed with me when I moved to Australia to study at Bond University, where I completed my bachelor's and master's degrees. Then, in January 2020, I graduated just as the world shut down.

Like many graduates, I found myself entering an uncertain job market. At the same time, Australia's borders closed, separating me from my family in New Caledonia. Rather than waiting for circumstances to change, I began working alongside my father, supporting our Australian operations and acting as the Australian base for several of our New Caledonian businesses.

For the first time, I wasn't observing the family enterprise. I was part of it.

What surprised me most wasn't simply the complexity of the businesses. It was the sheer depth of knowledge that existed beneath the surface.

I suddenly realised I was trying to learn in months what could have been shared gradually over decades. There were structures, relationships, history and unwritten lessons that no textbook could teach. They could only be understood by being part of the family enterprise itself.

Something else happened too: working together transformed my relationship with my father.

The more we communicated, the more I realised how wrong my earlier assumptions had been. He had never intended to exclude me. Like many founders, he had simply been focused on building. He assumed I would ask if I wanted to know more. I assumed he would tell me if he wanted me involved.

Neither of us was wrong, but neither of us had started the conversation.

Looking back, I often wonder how many business families experience the same misunderstanding. That realisation became the question I couldn't let go of: why do some families successfully carry their legacy across generations while others, despite every advantage, struggle to do the same?

At the time, several close friends had begun PhDs in completely different disciplines. Listening to them talk about pursuing questions they genuinely cared about made me realise that perhaps I could do the same.

Until then, I had never imagined an academic career, but I couldn't ignore the opportunity to explore a question that had become deeply personal.

My doctoral research focused on family businesses and, more specifically, family offices, an area of study that remains surprisingly under-researched despite the critical role family offices play in preserving wealth, governance and continuity.

What fascinated me most, however, wasn't the technical side of family offices, it was the human side.

Over the following years, I had the privilege of interviewing family principals, next-generation members, family office executives and trusted advisors across multiple countries.

Those conversations confirmed something I had begun to suspect: the challenges facing business families are rarely simple. Succession is not just about appointing a successor, governance is not just about structures, and preparing the next generation is not just about education.

Continuity is shaped by an intricate combination of family relationships, communication, trust, governance, identity, stewardship, timing and individual aspirations. Every family brings its own history, personalities and ambitions, which is why no two families require the exact same approach.

As my research progressed, I realised these were not simply academic questions. They were real challenges that families around the world were actively navigating. I wanted to take what I had learned beyond research and into practice, to help families address these challenges in a way that reflected their own unique circumstances.

That realisation fundamentally shaped how I approach advisory work today.

Throughout my research, I became increasingly convinced that families deserve more than generic frameworks or standardised solutions. The technical aspects of continuity matter enormously, but they are only one part of the picture. Behind every governance structure is a family. Behind every succession plan are individuals with different motivations, concerns and expectations.

Understanding those dynamics is just as important as understanding the technical structures that support them. That belief continues to guide my work today.

I now advise family offices, business families and ultra-high-net-worth principals on succession, governance, next-generation engagement and long-term continuity, combining lived experience with academic research to help families navigate challenges that are often deeply personal as much as they are strategic.

What motivates me isn't simply helping families transfer wealth, it is helping them preserve everything that gives that wealth meaning.

Having grown up within a business family, worked inside one, researched hundreds of family office and business family perspectives, and now advising families facing many of those same questions, I have come to appreciate that continuity is never achieved through a formula. It is built differently in every family.

More recently, that perspective has naturally extended into another area that I believe will only become more important over the coming decades: family reputation.

Today's next generation inherits more than ownership. They inherit a family name, a legacy and an increasingly permanent digital footprint.

This perspective naturally extended into my role as an Independent Advisor with Pavesen, where I help family principals and the next generation navigate the growing intersection between governance, leadership, reputation and digital strategy. In an increasingly transparent world, reputation has become another form of family capital, one that deserves the same thoughtful stewardship as any other family asset.

Looking back, it is almost ironic that the questions I once wanted answered inside my own family eventually became the questions that shaped both my research and my career.

I still don't believe there is a universal blueprint for continuity. Every family is different, every founder is different, and every next-generation member brings different motivations, capabilities and aspirations.

That is precisely what makes this work both challenging and deeply rewarding.

If my own journey has taught me anything, it is that continuity is never something families can simply assume. It requires intention, preparation and trust.

And perhaps most importantly, it requires the willingness to ask the difficult questions before they become urgent. Those are the conversations I was once searching for within my own family.

Today, I have the privilege of helping other families navigate those same questions in ways that reflect their own history, values and ambitions.

For me, there is no more meaningful work.

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Dr Clarisse Lafleur advises family offices, business families, and ultra-high-net-worth principals on succession, governance, next-generation engagement, and long-term continuity. Raised within a multi-generational family enterprise and combining that experience with doctoral research, she brings a perspective shaped by both lived experience and academic rigor.

Forbes’ top editor fired for secret payments A $21 billion wealth management M&A deal The 20% family office blueprint How family money reshaping luxury real estate New rich versus old rich investment strategies Living Large: Ferrari's first-ever Luce sells for $40M

One for the family office executives.

Curse of the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ goes all the way to the top.

Forbes Fired Top Editor After Discovering He Received Secret $6 Million Payment

When I heard that Randall Lane, the top editor of Forbes, was leaving the publication suddenly and without explanation in July, I was stunned. Randall had been synonymous with Forbes for more than a decade, and he had created some of its most popular franchises, including the "30 Under 30" list…

The wealth management M&A trend continues.

Corient Acquires Summit Trail Advisors in $21B Wealth Management Deal

Corient does it again - it has bought Summit Trail Advisors in one of the largest #wealthmanagement M&A deals of 2026 so far. That's just a few days after the Seven Bridges Advisors LLC acquisition. The pace is relentless. Summit focuses on #UHNW clients, and oversees around $21 billion of client money…

How technology is reshaping family business operations.

Family Businesses Leverage Technology for Efficiency and Resilience

Transformation isn’t just about adoption. It’s about aligning digital investment with long-term strategy and legacy. Hear how family businesses are approaching technology transformation and what sets leading organisations apart…

Living Large: the finer things in life

Ferrari's first ever electric car sold for $40M in a charity sale. It set a record for a new vehicle sold at auction. It sold yesterday at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance auction for more than 35 times the usual price of the car, with all proceeds of the sale to be donated to Ferrari Foundation's educational programmes. A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe set a record as the most valuable American car ever sold at auction the same day, fetching nearly $43M - BBC

The Luce “Chassis 0” sold for $40M.

Lisa Cornwell Webb, Partner, Leader Private Clients & Family Offices at PwC Switzerland

As a Partner and head of private clients and family offices at PwC Switzerland, Lisa Cornwell Webb advises some of the world’s wealthiest families.

It’s work she’s more than qualified for, having spent over 20 years advising international families and the institutions around them, based in both the United Kingdom and Switzerland, in banking and at the Big Four. 

“That mix matters and has informed my approach to my clients,” says Cornwell Webb. “Sitting on the bank side taught me how families are actually serviced day-to-day, which is quite different from how many advisers assume they are.”

Her experience has made her highly skeptical of any companies offering one-size-fits-all solutions, because her work has shown there just isn’t a single, typical client archetype.

“There genuinely isn't one, and I'd be wary of anyone who claims otherwise. What they share isn't a region or an AUM figure—it's complexity. A family with three passports, businesses in two continents, and children who want different things is our typical client, whether they hold 50 million Swiss Francs or several billion.”

Asking difficult questions

Cornwell Webb’s role involves a lot of hands-on work in cross-border tax structuring, governance, and succession, which means understanding clients well. 

“A lot of the value is unglamorous: asking the questions the family hasn't asked itself yet. Who actually makes decisions? What happens when the founder steps back? The technical structuring is often the easier part of the jigsaw —getting the family aligned can be far harder!” 

It’s personal work, and not the kind that can be easily replaced by technology, and though she says AI is starting to play a valuable support role, clients generally don’t want it near their data.

“We are using AI in the background for administrative and repetitive, low-value tasks that are necessary to serve our clients well. We also use AI as a co-creator to supplement our thinking as it can bring a different perspective to us.” 

“That said, we have more and more clients who explicitly ask that we do not yet use AI at all when it comes to their solutions as they value discretion of data so highly. I suspect that this will change in the coming years.” 

A measured approach

Working with international clients from around the world means she has encountered all types of families, each with their own ideas around how a family office should look. 

She highlights a common mistake is to focus on setting up a structure before deciding what it's actually for, or understanding the nuances of a region.

“Families rush to establish an entity, hire a team, start investing —then work out their risk appetite, their purpose, their values afterwards. It should be the reverse. The second mistake is underestimating substance: Switzerland only works if real people are making real decisions here. A "brass plate" set-up creates risk, not protection.

Every wealth hub has its own unique mix that makes it attractive to wealthy families, but sometimes someone’s desired location doesn’t make sense.

“We are truly agnostic when it comes to finding the best option for our clients - being neutral and driven solely by the family's needs is the most useful value-add we give.” 

“If a family's wealth, business, and next generation all sit in Asia for example, forcing a Swiss hub adds cost and friction for little benefit. Being willing to say ‘this isn't right for you’ is precisely what earns us the trust to advise them—and they know they can trust us if we say Switzerland is the right answer.”

Bullish on Switzerland

Switzerland might have been overtaken by Hong Kong as the world's largest cross-border wealth hub, but as we highlighted recently, there isn’t much concern in the Alpine country.

“Families are multi-hubbed and considering which jurisdiction is right for which piece of their lives,” says Cornwell Webb. “They can run their operational hub where their life is—Dubai, Singapore—and use Switzerland for what it does well: preservation, banking, neutral access to Europe.” 

She believes that the country’s reputation for stability will remain important, but isn’t enough on its own, with client needs evolving.

“The families we'll be serving in twenty years care about different things—making strategic direct investments, about technology, impact, purpose, and the next generation's values, not only ‘classic’ capital preservation.” 

“Capital is ever more mobile and ever more international. Switzerland's challenge is to stay relevant to those priorities, rather than assuming its history guarantees its future; but there is such great depth of experience here and such a strong track record for innovation that I am confident Switzerland will continue to be a leading global hub for wealth in the years to come.” 

For Cornwell Webb, the most rewarding part of her work is seeing a family arrive divided or anxious and delivering a solution that works for them.

“The technical work is satisfying, but I started working in private client work because I was interested in people and emotions, so it's always the human outcome that stays with me. It's also usually the thing the clients didn't know they needed when they first walked in!”

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What to read

Concerned you’ll say goodbye to summer without a memorable read? The J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List 2026 is here to help.

What to listen to

In this Navigating Wealth podcast, a discussion on messages that can stall a child's development, trust structures that accidentally produce dependent adults, and disclosure decisions that parents get wrong in both directions.

What to watch

Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, expects agentic AI to enable a “golden age” of entrepreneurship.

The annual Gumball 3000 rally is good business for international car logistics.

Driving the Amalfi coast’s jaw-dropping clifftop-hugging roads in a hire car is amazing. But wouldn’t it be annoying to be doing so in a cramped automatic hire car, knowing your Ferrari 250 GTO or Lamborghini Countach is in the garage at home. 

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible - and increasingly popular - to bring your car on holiday with you. The global luxury car transportation business has boomed over the past decade. 

One of the biggest players in the market is Dan Hallworth who set up his international car logistics firm from his home in Oldham, northern England. 

Hallworth, 35, a keen sportscars fan, said he noticed the increase in the number of Middle Eastern people coming to Europe for the summer season about 15 years ago. “I knew a lot of them have some serious supercar collections,” he told Mr Family Office. “And assumed they’d love to be able to drive them here.”

So he set about figuring out how to organize specialist airfreight and land-based transport for cars, and founded his own business Dan Car Logistics.

“Business built up quickly, with lots of demand from the Middle East,” Hallworth said. “Especially in the summer, when they are looking to escape the 45-50 C (113-122 F) degree temperatures.

“Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait are where our key customers live, and we help them bring their cars to Europe or the US,” he says. 

More often than not they bring more than just one car. “Nowadays, they’re bringing several cars along with them, like they’re suitcases,” he says. “They are doing it for status.

Another air freight delivery for Dan Car Logistics.

Hallworth said that over the years he has helped transport all sorts of cars, but “the most popular are Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Porsche, and Mercedes G class”. 

The most expensive car he has transported so far is a classic Ferrari worth - and insured - for $33 million. But, combined, he has overseen much more expensive transits. “Sometimes we have trucks with cars worth more than $70 million, and a few more in trailers,” he says. “In times like that we have to take out extra insurance.”

Generally, he said, customers either come from wealthy families or are self-made millionaires. “It is often people with generational wealth, or people who have made money from oil and gas and other businesses. They have houses throughout the world, and want to use their cars everywhere they are.”

Most trips include more than one leg, Hallworth says. It’s no longer just one trip to the south of France, Italy or London. “They’ll make the trip to one destination, and then move again - with their cars - from there to the next place or places.”

However, demand from the Middle East is notably lower this year because of the impact of the war in Iran on travel throughout the region. “We expect it to pick up as soon as the war is over, as everyone will want to start travelling again.”

The cost of transporting cars varies depending on the route, speed of delivery and the size and weight of the cars. “It can cost as little as $5,000 to $35,000 depending on the specifications.”

The fastest-growing part of the business is transporting cars for the annual supercar Gumball 3000 rally. In June more than 120 cars - ranging from classic models to hypercars - raced from Miami to Mexico City. Next year, the race is scheduled for Seoul to Tokyo. His advice: book in now. 

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Hodinkee Founder and President, Ben Clymer.

Ben Clymer gave up his job as a banker at UBS on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis to follow his dream: becoming a journalist and blogging about his lifelong passion for watches.

His parents - both public school teachers from upstate New York - worried he was giving up a very well-paid job for a hobby that might never make him a living. 

18 years later it’s fair to say Clymer’s parents’ fears were unfounded. That “hobby blog” Hodinkee - a bastardization of hodinky the Czech word for watch - now attracts millions of eyeballs a month and has made Clymer enough money to build his own extensive watch collection  - and another of classic cars.

His love of watches came from his grandfather who gave him his treasured Omega Speedmaster MK40. “Every time I would see my grandfather, he would let me wear the Omega,” he says in a video interview from his office in Soho, Manhattan. “Then, one day, when I was sixteen, I handed it back to him at the end of my visit and he said, ‘You know what? Keep it’.”

Clymer, 43, was a geeky kid - fascinated by the mechanisms of watches and an early adopter of the internet “back when you still had to do the actual coding”.

By age 15 he had created his own website, complete with gifs. But he never thought he could make a living solely online, so he did what all his friends were doing and got a job in finance.  

“I was still doing the blogging on the side, and it was starting to get noticed,” he says. “We were doing something that others weren’t - at the time - we were speaking to people in an ordinary way. Not speaking down to them, but engaging them on a level as equals.”

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Clymer suddenly had much more time to devote to Hodinkee. His day job ground to a halt but his boss still expected him to be in the office everyday leaving him with many hours in front of his computer to blog on his passion.

Then UBS put out a buyout offer, and Clymer jumped at it. “I thought fuck it, I don’t care about money,” he says. I want to do something fulfilling, and creative.”

Clymer used the UBS payout to fund a place at journalism school at Columbia University. He quickly impressed, and was offered a job at Forbes, but by then he was making more money from advertising on Hodinkee than Forbes would have paid him as a lifestyle writer. 

Hodinkee grew slowly, but Clymer was starting to get emails from readers. “They would say things like ‘I read your story on the Paul Newman Rolex Dayton, and I went out and bought one.’ That’s like a $100,000 watch, and they’re buying it based on what some kid from Rochester says. That’s when I knew it would work.”

Next came celebrity readers. “I got an email from [singer songwriter ] John Mayer, saying how much he liked the site,” Clymer says. “I thought it was my friends fucking with me. But it really was him.”

Clymer interviewed Mayer for a video series called Talking Watches, which went on to become the most-viewed watch content on YouTube. The series has attracted dozens of celebrities including British singer Ed Sheeran, American TV personality Adam Levine and  François-Henry Bennahmias, the chief executive of luxury watch company Audemars Piguet.

The industry noticed, with Clymer receiving dozens of takeover offers from watch manufacturers and retailers as well as private equity firms. He stuck it out alone until December 2020 when Hodinkee raised $40 million from investors — including LVMH Luxury Ventures, Mayer and the former NFL quarterback Tom Brady in a deal organized by Los Angeles private equity firm Chernin Group that reportedly valued Hodinkee at $100 million. 

In 2024 Hodinkee was bought by UK-based Watches of Switzerland Group for $14 million. Clymer says teaming up with Watches of Switzerland helps the overall watch community as it “brings together an enormous retail network and with a media network, that will allow us to reach more people and do more cool stuff.” 

Despite now being part of Watches of Switzerland, Clymer says Hodinkee is still free to work with all watch brands. “They let us do what we want to do. We’re still in the same office doing the same things.” 

Asked about what he plans for the future, Clymer says, characteristically bluntly, “Fuck some shit up, and have some fun!”  

There will be more Hodinkee collaborations with both Watches of Switzerland and other luxury watch brands, but none are likely to attract the fervor of the recent tie up between Audemars Piguet and Swatch.

The Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection caused chaos at stores upon launch.

Fights broke out, police were called and stores were forced to close when Swatch launched the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop Collection from $400 in May this year. The watches are now available on the secondary market for a minimum of $1,000. 

“That was a collab that really cut through beyond the watch community,” Clymer says. “A number of people texted me about it - not my watch friends, my friend-friends from high school. It really got people excited about watches again.

Clymer says it was a great fit for both sides. “For AP it showed that there is a real thirst for hard luxury,” he says. “And Swatch with all its stores showed what real hype could be.”

The hype could have gone a bit too far though he says, describing the security incidents at some stores as “unfortunate”. 

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Partner content by BILL.

Client retention is a priority for advisors, especially in light of data showing that a third of wealth management clients intend to switch providers or move assets by 2021. Advisors can strengthen their relationships with current high-net-worth clients by providing services that offer wealth management clients value beyond investment advice. Expanding into adjacent services requires some careful planning, however. If client loyalty comes at too high a cost in time, labor or additional business risk, it may not be worth an advisor’s investment.

Balancing the needs of advisors and clients requires a combination of the right service to alleviate a particular client pain point and a technology platform to deliver that service securely and efficiently. Bill pay services are especially attractive for advisors who work with high-networth (HNW) clients—or for those who want to break into that market.

The potential for these services remains a blind spot for advisors, however. In a recent survey conducted by WealthManagement.com, 75% of advisors indicated some level of concern about client retention. Only 13% indicated they were looking into implementing value-added services of any kind, however.

Why bill pay is important to high-net-worth clients

For households and even small mom and pop businesses, paying bills typically represents little more than a minor nuisance. For more complex business structures, keeping track of where particular expenses are in the payment process and quickly routing them to the right approvers requires significantly more attention and effort. High-net-worth clients who have multiple foundations, trusts, properties or businesses have a lot more bills to track, pay and record. Since paying bills has traditionally been a manual, paper-based process, that added complexity means more time, more labor and ultimately more cost as clients grow and expand. Manual, paper-based processes also expose firms to a greater risk of fraud and resource-consuming audits.

Expense management records are critical tax and compliance tools, so organizations that skimp on the resources they deploy for bill pay risk serious financial and legal consequences. As organizations have found the process too burdensome or time-consuming to handle themselves, they have commonly sought to outsource the efforts instead. Accountants have traditionally been the primary service providers offering bill pay services because of the relationship between those efforts and tax preparation—and because many accounting firms have long experience with burdensome, manual processes.

The right technology matters

The association of bill pay with time-consuming manual labor may be a turn-off for wealth management firms and family offices looking for ways to expand their practice into areas that can further help their clients. If a client with a high volume of bills to pay spends 10 hours a month capturing invoices, seeking approvals, making payments and reconciling the books, finding a specialist or hiring a team to spend those same 10 hours on the client’s behalf is unlikely to make good business sense.

With the right technology, however, adding bill pay as a service offering can alleviate many of the pain points clients experience, while also reducing the time and labor required to do the process right. For example, an offering like BILL bakes many of the time-consuming and risky elements of manual bill pay processes into its technology platform. It auto-enters invoice details for review, easily routes clients’ bills and review notes through pre-determined approval workflows saving time managing clients’ bill pay. The platform also provides multiple, secure payment options which allows firms to pay bills quickly, to eliminate the hassle of having a person physically sign a check, and to have time-stamped audit trails. Those are major benefits for firms that used to require an accounts payable clerk to get checks signed by a CFO or partner in person—especially during the pandemic.

Getting the platform right is important because bill pay done wrong can be a disaster. Even missing a single bill could cause clients to doubt the firm’s reliability and cause them to look elsewhere not only for bill pay services, but for management of their investment portfolio as well. Firms that work with high-net-worth clients may have been slow to adopt bill pay as a value-added service because of this level of risk.

According to Bob Jacobson, Partner at Friedman & Huey Associates LLP, having the right technology in place changes the equation substantially. “Before BILL, bill pay was something to be avoided,” he said. “Now it is something to be marketed.”

Adding bill pay as a service offering can alleviate many of the pain points clients experience, while also reducing the time and labor required to do the process right.

Competitive differentiation

An efficient technology platform changes the stakes for advisors considering bill pay as a value-added service. They can offer clients an opportunity to offload a time-consuming manual process while also making the process significantly more efficient. BILL clients have seen the time required to deal with accounts payable or bill pay processes cut by 50% after they implement the solution.

Fewer than one in five advisors report that they currently offer bill pay services to their clients today. Adding this service creates a point of competitive differentiation in a marketplace that’s more concerned than ever with client churn. It also addresses a pain point that is more prevalent among clients toward the top of the wealth spectrum—among the most attractive client populations for advisors seeking to increase their assets under management.

Adopting an efficient, secure bill pay platform has proven to be a game-changer for Josh Levine, Founder and CEO of Cornerstone Family Office LLC, which provides wealth administration services for ultra-high-net-worth clients. “We could not be happier with the move,” he said. “It has transformed the way we service and engage with clients, allowing us to shift from a cumbersome and time-intensive process to a streamlined and secure digital platform.”

Deepening existing client relationships

More importantly, bill pay can contribute to client retention in significant ways. The equation is straightforward: The more valued-added services advisors can provide to their clients, the harder it becomes for clients to replace them easily. Bill pay also subtly creates organic opportunities to stay in touch with clients through simple, low-friction interactions whenever bills need approvals or monthly reports come due. Levine found that capability especially useful as his firm dealt with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. “The move gave us the tools we needed to quickly adapt to the requirements of a remote work environment and enables us to provide the high-touch support needed to serve our families without being physically tethered to our office,” he said.

Additional visibility into a client’s bill pay activities can offer valuable insight for advisors as they develop financial strategies. Currently 56% of advisors indicate they rely on manual reporting for insight into their clients’ cash flows, which means they get only periodic visibility into their clients’ business operations.

The pandemic economy has driven home the importance of cash flow in near-term planning. A bill pay platform that connects seamlessly with a client’s back-end accounting system means advisors can have a much more up-to-date picture of the expense side of a client’s balance sheet. If a client’s spending rises unexpectedly, an advisor can respond more quickly with tactical adjustments before a looming cash flow issue becomes a crisis.

A win-win for high-net-worth clients and advisors

As advisors focus on attracting and retaining clients, the vast majority indicate they intend to implement new technology to improve digital communication, add support staff and beef up training opportunities to ensure those new technologies get used properly. As important as those elements are, bill pay offers a more direct path to competitive differentiation and client retention. Bill pay is a value-added service that solves a current pain point for an attractive, affluent client segment. It also incentivizes those clients to turn to their advisor for more of their financial needs, further deepening the advisor-client relationship.

Taken in combination, a broader service line, a higher-touch advisor-client relationship and a deeper understanding of a client’s financial picture are a recipe for increased customer loyalty. “BILL works as superglue with our clients,” said Bob Jacobson. “When you do it right, they will never want to leave you.”

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BILL offers secure, transparent, easy-to-manage bill pay solutions that help single family offices, multi-family offices, RIAs, wealth management firms, and accounting firms exceed expectations. Elevate security and service: ditch paper checks, while balancing control, flexibility, and automation - find out more at bill.com/wealthmanagement