A new era for family offices

In the modern world, governance is vital for families. From a reputation perspective, tax, cost-efficiency, oversight and ease of management, well run, adequately governed structures are considered central to long-term success. This is especially important because UHNW families need such extensive structures as standard. Typically, these are a mix of trusts, private funds, corporate vehicles for family businesses, holding companies, foundations for philanthropic endeavours and structures to hold specific assets like yachts or jets.

Because different expertise is needed for each type of structure, and a family has global interests, hiring a team of experts in-house is expensive for the family office. Outsourcing to a single service provider that can offer experts in their field in relevant locations is efficient and provides a streamlined approach.

It’s easier than you’d think for a family’s structuring to get messy and inefficient from an administration perspective. While individual structures might be set up properly, oversight and understanding the bigger picture is important and ensuring governance and efficiency overall is key to meeting the family’s objectives. Family offices will often have tax and legal experts but don’t often have specific corporate, fund and trust structuring expertise in-house. Instead, they outsource it to providers like ZEDRA.

ZEDRA’s family office services

We assist clients in setting up structures for assets such as trusts, foundations, funds and corporate vehicles. We provide consolidated reporting as required. Our Fiduciary Services can provide asset allocation and independent benchmarking of a client’s portfolio if the family is multi banked or indeed we can just provide administration oversight to personally held assets.

ZEDRA can provide all manner of back-office services which a family might require, including asset record keeping and day-to-day bookkeeping. We can also support centralised management or oversight of investments, tax, estate and philanthropic planning depending on the family’s needs.

We also provide corporate, secretarial and administration services, fund administration, holding structures for the acquisition of yachts and aircraft, administration of these assets, arranging for the crewing and also the management of craft.

Additionally, our Private Office team, headed by Charlotte, supports our clients with lifestyle management, family governance advice and other bespoke services such as immigration, security and asset cataloguing.