Single family offices are increasingly faced with the topic of succession whether triggered by an upcoming departure of a family office executive or a broader transition in generational family leadership.
Offering a competitive compensation plan is essential to attracting and retaining the top talent that can ensure the family office’s success. However, compensation is also consistently the biggest line item in every family office budget. This makes designing compensation plans that are competitive and effective especially imperative.
The new revenue recognition standard—set to go into effect in 2018 for public entities and 2019 for nonpublic entities—has been and continues to be a hot topic during our conversations with clients. Unlike most other accounting changes, the new standard will influence organizations not just at the financial-statement level, but also at the operational level. Although the deadline for implementation is a year or two away, organizations have already reached a fork in the road: they must decide whether to engage in proactive planning now, or face risky consequences later.
Imagine trying to protect a multi-generational family with 15 households and 25 properties in multiple states—not to mention all their vehicles, collections and personal property. Then there’s liability exposure for dozens of individuals, each with their own unique set of risks. Providing insurance protection for this level of exposure is challenging and requires specialized expertise on many levels. This paper highlights the complex risks faced by multi-generational families and how proper risk management can successfully protect their wealth for future generations.
With the dramatic expansion of family wealth in the United States and around the world, family offices are a growing part of the global financial landscape. Depending on the family’s mission, service needs, professional skill set of individual family members, and their existing advisor network, a family office may be appropriate. While every family is unique, there are common situations that might call for a family to consider the advantages of establishing a family office.
You’ve created a great trust structure, but is the family interested and engaged? To garner buy-in, interest, and commitment from the family the trust company structure must be designed in a way that is both functional and empowering for current and rising generations. In this webinar, Thomas C. Rogerson, Senior Managing Director and Family Wealth Strategist, Wilmington Trust illustrated how to strengthen structures within partnerships, how to keep the trust company relevant for future generations, and how and where processes and services should be outsourced.
Data breaches have become an accepted fact of modern business. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, twenty-nine businesses reported data breaches in August of 2016 alone. No industry was safe. For many organizations, the question now is not “if,” but “when.” This year appears to be on pace to surpass the number of breaches reported last year. With that in mind, there are concrete steps an organization can take to mitigate the cost of a breach that could occur later.
The announcement of proposed regulations under Internal Revenue Code Section 2704 has many families and their advisors scrambling to mitigate the potential impact the regulation could have on their estate planning efforts. Owners of family businesses have traditionally relied on valuation discounts to curb the estate and gift tax burden associated with transferring wealth and ownership to future generations. That could all change by the end of the year, should the proposed regulations take effect.
Managing fiduciary responsibilities within a private trust company can sometimes feel like more of an art than a science. Developing effective and meaningful relationships with the beneficiaries, overseeing distributions and investment policy, understanding how and when decanting a trust is the best solution, while also being aware of the statutes under which the PTC should be operating all mandate experience and insight.
QuickBooks and Excel are a common software pairing for family offices that seemingly has cost, flexibility and familiarity on its side. However, the disadvantages of this approach soon begin to outweigh the benefits. The fact that close to 90% of spreadsheets contain errors in at least 1% of all formula cells means considerable hidden risk. Plus, family office demands on QuickBooks tend to quickly exceed its functionality and the spreadsheet as de-facto reporting tool can only work for so long.