Insights, guides & briefings.
Working papers from our directors on cross-border structuring, banking, licensing, mobility and tax. Long-form guides for the topics that repay careful reading; short briefings when the news moves.
Tier-by-tier diagrams of holding stacks, funds, trusts, licensed entities and asset vehicles — with the tax drivers and the failure points.
Browse the library →The brief, the structure we built, the sequence of steps, the timeline and the fee model — real files, identifying detail removed.
Read the files →Results
Economic substance in practice: what inspectors actually ask for
Substance rules are no longer a form-filling exercise. Registries in the BVI, Cayman, the UAE and the Channel Islands are running real inspections and issuing real penalties. This guide sets out, activity by activity, the evidence that satisfies an inspector — and the evidence that does not.
The single family office cost curve: at what point does it stop making sense?
A single family office is a business with employees, premises, regulatory exposure and a payroll that does not fall when markets do. This article sets out realistic annual cost bands, the asset levels at which each model breaks even, and the hybrid arrangements that work better for most families.
Family offices are not private clients. They are not corporate clients either.
A single-family office is neither a private client nor a corporate mandate. It is a firm-within-a-firm, with an investment committee, an operating budget, its own governance and its own risk. Advisors who default to one lens or the other consistently miss what the principal actually needs. This piece sets out how directors should scope, staff and price family-office work in 2026.
The single-family-office set-up checklist
Setting up a single-family office is a governance exercise as much as a legal one. Structure, licensing, jurisdiction, staffing, technology, reporting cadence, custody and banking all have to line up before the first investment is booked. This is the working checklist we take every new SFO principal through, sequenced in the order that avoids expensive rework six months in.
Every insight starts as a real client file.
If a piece here maps to your situation, the fastest next step is a director call — written diagnosis in five business days, fixed-fee from the first line.