Three cities.
Two principals.
One mandate.

The assumption that fails first

Most estate planning begins with a single jurisdiction in mind. The lawyer is local. The assets are largely local. The family members live nearby. The resulting structure — however well-designed — is optimised for a world that, for many wealthy families, no longer exists.

The reality for a significant proportion of ultra-high-net-worth families today is more complex: assets held across three or four countries, family members resident in different tax jurisdictions, trusts established in one legal framework attempting to govern assets in another. The question is not whether this creates complexity. It does. The question is whether the structure was designed to absorb that complexity — or merely to ignore it until it becomes a problem.

A structure designed for one jurisdiction, applied across three, is not a multi-jurisdictional structure. It is a single-jurisdiction structure with unresolved problems in two others.

What multi-jurisdictional planning actually requires

Genuine cross-border estate planning is not a matter of having advisors in multiple countries. It is a matter of having someone who can hold the full picture and ensure that the decisions made in each jurisdiction are coherent with the decisions made in the others. This is rarer than it sounds.

The specific issues that arise most frequently: Trust recognition. A trust established under one legal system may not be recognised — or may be recognised differently — under another. Families with trusts in common law jurisdictions holding assets in civil law countries encounter this regularly. Forced heirship. Several European jurisdictions impose mandatory inheritance shares that can override testamentary wishes, regardless of where the will was drafted. Tax treaty gaps. The interaction between US estate tax, Swiss wealth tax, and the tax treatment of beneficiaries resident in low-tax European jurisdictions creates combinations that no single advisor's domestic practice was designed to navigate — and that compound in complexity with each additional jurisdiction involved.

The role of the family structure document

Beyond the legal and tax architecture, families who hold wealth across jurisdictions benefit significantly from a governing document that sits above the legal structures — a family charter or constitution that articulates the principles by which decisions will be made, regardless of which jurisdiction's law applies in any given situation.

This document does not have legal force in the conventional sense. Its force is relational and normative. It represents the family's agreement with itself about what the wealth is for, how it will be governed, and what principles will guide decisions that no trust deed or will can fully anticipate. In our experience, families who have this document in place navigate jurisdictional complexity with significantly less friction than those who do not.

Timing and transitions

The optimal moment to address cross-border complexity is before a transition event creates urgency. The death of a founder, a family member relocating to a new jurisdiction, or a significant liquidity event are all moments when structural decisions need to be made quickly — and quickly-made structural decisions in complex multi-jurisdictional situations rarely produce optimal outcomes. The families who handle these moments well are those who addressed the underlying architecture in advance.

The horizon advantage

Time is the most undervalued asset in private wealth management. Not in the abstract sense — every investor understands that compounding requires time. In the more specific sense that a genuine multi-decade horizon changes what is possible, what is rational, and what constitutes risk.

A pension fund with a thirty-year liability horizon and a family office with a generational mandate have something important in common: neither of them needs to care very much about what markets do next quarter. This is not a philosophical position. It is an operational one, with direct consequences for how a portfolio should be constructed.

Volatility is only risk if you need the money. For a family with a thirty-year horizon and appropriate liquidity reserves, short-term price movements are noise — and treating them as signal is expensive.

What the long horizon makes possible

Three categories of investment become meaningfully more attractive with a genuine long horizon. Illiquidity premium capture. Private equity, private credit, and real assets carry an illiquidity premium — the return available to investors who can commit capital for seven to twelve years without needing it back. For families with adequate liquid reserves elsewhere, this premium is accessible and consistent. Institutional data suggests it has historically added two to four percentage points of annualised return above comparable public market exposures. But the illiquidity premium is only part of the story. Private markets are structurally less efficient than public ones: information is uneven, pricing is infrequent, and the quality of outcomes is heavily dispersed across managers. This inefficiency is a genuine source of outperformance for investors with the access, diligence capability, and patience to exploit it — and a source of underperformance for those who do not. The long-horizon investor who selects managers carefully is not merely capturing a liquidity premium. They are operating in a market where skill and relationships still compound.

Volatility as opportunity. A thirty-year investor can hold a higher allocation to volatile assets without the psychological or operational pressure that forces shorter-horizon investors to sell at the wrong moment. The long-run equity risk premium — the return available to investors who can hold through downturns — is one of the most reliable premia in finance. It is also one of the most consistently surrendered by investors who cannot stomach the volatility required to earn it. But for families who plan properly, volatility is not merely a cost to be tolerated — it is a source of opportunity. A bear market plan, established in advance and in writing, defines precisely what the family will do when markets fall: which assets will be rebalanced into, which dry powder will be deployed, and at what thresholds. Families who enter a downturn with this plan in place act with conviction. Those who do not tend to act with fear. The difference in long-run outcomes between those two postures is considerable.

Thematic concentration. Long-horizon investors can make concentrated bets on structural trends — demographic shifts, energy transition, digitisation of financial infrastructure — that will take fifteen to twenty years to fully play out. Institutions with shorter mandates are structurally disadvantaged in this space. Patient families are not.

What the long horizon makes more dangerous

The risks that matter most over thirty years are not the ones that dominate short-term investment thinking. Market volatility, economic cycles, and even most geopolitical events are noise at the generational scale. The risks that genuinely threaten thirty-year wealth are structural: inflation erosion of purchasing power over decades, jurisdictional and tax regime changes that alter the after-tax return on entire asset classes, governance failures within the family that result in forced liquidations at the wrong moment, and illiquidity mismatches — holding assets that cannot be sold when the family genuinely needs capital.

Managing these risks requires a different discipline from conventional portfolio risk management. It requires scenario planning across decades, not quarters. It requires liquidity architecture — the deliberate segmentation of the portfolio into tranches with different time horizons and different roles. And it requires the kind of governance that keeps the family aligned on the purpose of the portfolio through the inevitable generational transitions.

The practical implication

A portfolio genuinely designed for a thirty-year horizon looks materially different from one designed for a seven-year institutional mandate. It holds more private assets. It accepts more short-term volatility in exchange for higher long-run returns. It is less diversified across liquid asset classes and more concentrated in high-conviction positions where the time advantage is real. And it is governed by a framework — an investment policy statement — that makes these choices explicit, so that the rationale survives personnel changes and generational transitions.

What it is — and what it is not

An investment policy statement — an IPS — is a written document that defines the objectives, constraints, and decision-making framework for a pool of capital. Endowments have them. Pension funds have them. Sovereign wealth funds have them. Most private family wealth is managed without one.

This is not because families lack sophistication. It is because the institutions that serve them have rarely had an incentive to create one. A well-drafted IPS constrains what an advisor can recommend. It makes switching easier. It creates accountability. None of these things are in the institutional advisor's interest — which is precisely why the IPS is in yours.

An investment policy statement does not tell you what to buy. It tells you why you own what you own — and gives you a framework for deciding when that is no longer true.

What a family IPS contains

The core elements are consistent across all serious versions of the document, though the specifics vary significantly by family. Purpose and objectives. What is this capital for? Capital preservation across generations is a different objective from funding lifestyle spending, endowing a foundation, or providing seed capital for family entrepreneurs. A portfolio that serves all these purposes simultaneously without making them explicit will serve none of them well.

Return and risk parameters. What real return does the portfolio need to achieve its objectives? What level of drawdown can the family tolerate without being forced into decisions they would not make under calmer conditions? These numbers, written down and agreed upon in advance, are what prevent the most common and expensive mistakes in private wealth management — panic selling in downturns, reaching for yield in complacent periods.

Asset allocation ranges. Not targets, but ranges — the minimum and maximum allocations to each asset class that are consistent with the family's objectives and constraints. These ranges create the decision space within which tactical adjustments can be made without requiring the entire governance structure to reconvene for every portfolio change.

Liquidity requirements. How much of the portfolio must be accessible within thirty days? Ninety days? One year? The liquidity architecture of a portfolio is the foundation on which all illiquidity premium capture depends. Without it explicit, families consistently either hold too much liquid capital — sacrificing return — or find themselves forced to liquidate illiquid positions at the worst possible moment.

The governance function

Beyond its investment function, the IPS serves a governance role that becomes more important with each passing generation. It is the document that a new trustee reads to understand the intent behind the portfolio. It is the framework against which a new advisor is evaluated. It is the reference point that allows the family to have a productive conversation about whether the portfolio is still serving its purpose — rather than a fraught conversation about whether any particular investment was a good idea.

Families who have a well-drafted IPS make better decisions under pressure. They are less susceptible to advisors who introduce products without a clear fit. They transition more smoothly across generations because the rationale for the portfolio is explicit rather than residing in the head of a single family member or a single trusted advisor.

Starting the conversation

Drafting an IPS is not a technical exercise. It is a conversation — about what the family values, what it fears, what it is building toward, and what it is protecting against. That conversation is best had before the portfolio is assembled, not after. But it is never too late to have it. The alternative — continuing to manage capital without an explicit framework — compounds its own cost quietly and invisibly, in the form of decisions that could have been better, and transitions that could have been smoother.