Fast-growing emerging economies offer great business potential for multi-family offices, particularly for those prepared to go the extra mile for clients with recently acquired wealth. Many of these will have made their fortunes in the 1990s and are considering diversification and succession planning for the first time.
“China now has the second highest concentration of billionaires in the world,” says Rolf Roetheli, a wealth and tax planning expert at Julius Baer, the Swiss private bank. “However, family offices in the region, which number just over 100, do not reflect the boom in regional wealth. The growth of HNWIs [high net worth individuals] and ultra-HNWIs in Asia has outpaced the availability of experienced wealth managers and relationship managers.
“There is a huge opportunity for providing services around structuring their families’ wealth for the future such as intergenerational wealth transfer, philanthropy and estate planning.”