The family office is usually discussed as an investment question. It is better understood as a governance question that happens to hold investments. Most fortunes that fail to survive into the third generation are not lost to bad markets; they are lost to unclear ownership, unresolved succession, and structures that were built for the founder’s tax position in a single year and never revisited.
The problem families face is rarely a shortage of advice. It is the opposite. A founder who has just sold a business, or a second generation inheriting a portfolio of companies, property, art and a yacht, is approached by private banks, multi-family offices, trust companies, tax counsel and consultants, each of whom frames the decision around the service they sell. The bank proposes a discretionary mandate. The trust company proposes a trust. The consultant proposes a single family office with a chief investment officer. All three may be right, but in a different order, and the order matters.
What follows is a working framework: the questions that should be settled before anything is incorporated, the warning signs that a proposed structure serves the adviser more than the family, and how to approach the professionals who build these arrangements.
Why structure fails before markets do
A family office sits on top of a legal architecture: holding companies, trusts or foundations, partnership vehicles, and the operating entity that employs staff and pays the bills. Each layer answers a different question. Who owns the assets? Who controls them? Who benefits? Who decides when the founder can no longer decide? When those four questions have the same answer, the structure is simple and fragile. When they have deliberately different answers, it can survive divorce, death, relocation and family disagreement.
The difficulty is that these structures are typically assembled under time pressure, often in the months around a liquidity event, by advisers optimising for the immediate tax outcome. Ten years later the family has moved jurisdiction, a child has married into a different matrimonial regime, and the original trust deed gives a protector powers nobody remembers granting.
Seven questions to settle first
1. Single family office, multi-family office, or neither? The common rule of thumb is that a dedicated single family office begins to make economic sense somewhere above USD 250 million in investable assets, once staff, systems, compliance and premises are costed honestly. Below that, most families are better served by a multi-family office or a private bank’s family office desk, keeping a small internal team for oversight. The test is not prestige but control: what does the family need to own outright, and what can it rent?
2. Where should the structure sit, and where will the family live? Jurisdiction choices are now driven as much by residence as by asset location. The United Kingdom replaced its non-domicile regime with a residence-based system in April 2025, which changed the calculus for many internationally mobile families overnight. Switzerland has no trust law of its own but recognises foreign trusts under the Hague Convention. Liechtenstein offers the foundation, a civil-law vehicle familiar to continental families. Singapore and the UAE compete actively for family office registrations through specific regulatory regimes. Jersey and Guernsey remain the default for trust administration and private trust companies. The right answer depends on where the next generation is likely to be resident in fifteen years, not where the founder is today.
3. Trust, foundation, or company? Common-law families tend to reach for a trust; civil-law families often prefer a foundation, which has legal personality and a clearer governance structure. In the UK, family investment companies became popular after the 2006 changes to the taxation of trusts, because shares can be held by family members while voting control remains with the founders. Each vehicle has a different answer to the question of control, and each is treated differently by the tax authority of every country in which a beneficiary may live.
4. Who holds control after the founder? This is the question most often deferred. A private trust company, a family council, a protector, or a board with independent members: the mechanism matters less than the fact that it has been chosen, documented and explained to the people it will govern. A structure in which the founder holds every reserved power works perfectly until the day it does not work at all.
5. How will the next generation be prepared? Families that survive transitions usually begin education early and formally: involvement in investment committees, a written family constitution, and exposure to the advisers before inheritance rather than after. Several of the larger multi-family offices now run structured next-generation programmes for precisely this reason.
6. Where do the trophy assets sit? Property, art, aircraft and yachts are frequently held outside the core structure, bought personally or through ad hoc companies. They are also the assets most likely to cause dispute, because they carry emotional value and running costs that are hard to divide. Each should be placed deliberately, with a clear position on use, maintenance cost allocation and eventual sale.
7. How will the structure be reviewed? A structure should have a review date in the same way a lease has a break clause. Every three to five years, or after any change of residence, marriage, death or major sale, the architecture should be tested against current law and current family reality.
Red flags
Several patterns recur in structures that later have to be unwound at cost.
- Advice that starts with a product. If the first proposal names a fund, a policy or a specific booking centre before anyone has mapped the family’s residences and objectives, the sequence is wrong.
- Complexity for its own sake. Every additional entity adds annual filing, audit and substance costs, and another point at which reporting can fail. If the adviser cannot explain on one page why each layer exists, it probably should not.
- No independent voice in governance. Boards and trustee bodies made up entirely of the founder’s longest-serving employees tend to defer to the founder while alive and fracture once the founder is gone.
- Tax as the only design criterion. Structures built purely to minimise a single year’s liability are the first to be challenged under substance and anti-avoidance rules, and the first to break when a family member moves.
- One adviser in every role. When the same firm designs the structure, acts as trustee, manages the assets and reports on performance, nobody is positioned to say that something is wrong.
- Silence on cost. A credible multi-family office or trust company will set out its fee basis in writing before onboarding. Reluctance to do so is information.
Who builds these structures
A sound family office is assembled from distinct disciplines, and the strongest arrangements keep them separate.
Private client lawyers design the architecture. Withers, headquartered in London, has built much of its practice around international families with assets and heirs in several jurisdictions, which is exactly where structuring becomes difficult. Offshore firms such as Mourant in the Channel Islands advise on the trusts, foundations and private trust companies that sit at the centre of many structures.
Multi-family offices operate them. Stonehage Fleming, with offices in London, Jersey, Geneva and Zurich, is typically engaged by families with assets across several countries who want an outsourced family office rather than building their own, often starting with fiduciary structures and consolidated reporting before expanding into investment and succession work.
Private banks provide custody, lending and investment management, and increasingly family office advisory. Pictet, partner-owned since 1805, and Rothschild & Co Wealth Management, controlled by the family whose name it carries, are both frequently chosen by families who value an institution whose ownership has itself survived several generations. That alignment is not a guarantee, but it is a reasonable question to ask any bank: how has your own ownership been structured, and why?
How Trophy Registry helps
Trophy Registry does not advise on structures and does not refer families to individual firms for a fee. What it provides is a starting point that is not pay-to-play. Every firm in the Private Banking and Legal categories has been researched against published criteria, set out on our standards page, with third-party evidence linked wherever a firm carries the Institutionally Verified badge.
For families beginning the process, a practical sequence is to shortlist two private client lawyers and two multi-family offices or private banks independently of one another, so that the architect and the operator are not chosen by the same person. Our Zurich briefing covers one of the principal jurisdictions in more depth.
Corrections, additions and suggestions for firms that belong in this directory can be sent to info@trophyregistry.com.