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The holidays are approaching and to make it a more relaxed and enjoyable season, it helps to plan in advance and know the best practices for holiday planning, entertaining, gift giving, entertaining, and decorating.

The wealth management industry is constantly reinventing itself, and with every passing year, firms continue to push software vendors to deliver features and functionality that not only enhance their existing solution but offer an unparalleled experience. It is often difficult to know which innovations are relevant and which are not. Having a guide outlining the seven technology innovations can help members of the wealth management industry make more prudent and educated decisions regarding their technology solutions.

Purchasing a wealth management technology solution is a significant business decision for your firm. You have likely been tasked with sourcing a platform that meets the needs of your principals, your team and your stakeholders. The solution should support your internal accounting, investment management and reporting functions while streamlining your firm’s day-to-day operations. As an executive, where should you begin? To assist you in the research, there are more than 50 questions to help guide through the process of finding the right solution for your firm.

With the U.S. elections front and center in the minds of most investors around the world, we focus this edition of Global Foresight on the potential outcomes of the November 8, 2016 vote and discuss how the elections could impact the composition of the Supreme Court, legislative priorities for the next Congress and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

When former First Lady Nancy Reagan passed away in March 2016, millions of Americans mourned the loss. While the events honoring Mrs. Reagan unfurled seamlessly, a dedicated team was hard at work behind the scenes to ensure the funeral was being conducted to Mrs. Reagan’s expressed desires. The preparations and demands of the funeral may seem extreme, but many of Mrs. Reagan's concerns apply to other families of wealth and should be addressed.

In both complex commercial and family disputes, the caucus-style mediation has been the predominantly employed method over the joint mediation session. But as society and business systems continue to evolve, the mediation process must also evolve to where mediators should more aggressively explore the benefits of joint sessions with the parties at the outset of mediation. In a new generation of transparency-driven parties—faced with issues of growing complexity and personal implications—it calls for a dispute resolution process that is less obscure and manipulative.

What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School was a New York Times best-seller that highlighted ingredients to success absent from America’s business schools. In today’s negative interest rate environment, there may be an even more important consideration for business school grads—to consciously forget much of what was taught in business school. This paper identifies several investing concepts broadly taught across the nation and preached on Wall Street.

Today’s PFTCs bear little resemblance to ‘private trust companies’ of the 1990s, the gestation era for the PFTC. The modern US PFTC also differs markedly from a third form of ‘private trust company’: its ‘offshore’ single family private trust company (OFTC). Limited federal taxation of foreign trusts and privacy protections as good as or better than those found in traditional offshore jurisdictions have led some commentators to call the United States the ‘new offshore’ jurisdiction for trusts.

Most family offices that serve U.S. families are well aware that special planning considerations can arise when a U.S. citizen family member marries a noncitizen. Should the client’s estate plan be revised to incorporate a qualified domestic trust (QDOT) to ensure that assets passing to the surviving noncitizen spouse qualify for federal estate tax marital deduction?

In early April 2016 files leaked from a large Panama-based law firm (known as the ‘Panama Papers’) brought to the attention of many the ways in which offshore companies and structures can be used to obscure the identity of beneficial owners, some of whom have used such entities to avoid paying tax in their country of tax residence.