PCD Leeds Conference | Panel 7: Family Office | 3 March 2026

The final session of the day was introduced by Paul Blake, Head of Banking and Fiduciaries at Finance Isle of Man, who framed the conversation with a perspective that few in the room are positioned to offer: how regional wealth looks when viewed from the vantage point of an international finance centre. The traditional family office model — discreet, investment-focused, broadly domestic — is, he argued, giving way to something considerably more dynamic. Governance has professionalised, cross-border structuring has become routine, and the question of purpose across generations is being asked with a new urgency. "Family offices today are rarely purely local or purely offshore," he observed. "They're interconnected, and they operate across regulatory environments, time zones, and asset classes."

The panel that followed — Phil Harris of Coppice, Ruben Sinha of JMW Solicitors, Anna Richens of Deloitte, and Catherine French of DQ Advocates — brought four very different vantage points to bear on a sector that is, by design, almost impossible to define neatly.

Defining the Indefinable

Host Ken Chapman opened with the question that, as he acknowledged, had preoccupied the panel's preparatory call: what is a family office? Harris, who runs a multi-family office after twenty years in private banking, offered the clearest taxonomy. A single family office is a structure built around one ultra-wealthy family — staff employed directly, no external clients, entirely private. A multi-family office is a commercial entity providing similar services across multiple families simultaneously. Beyond those two poles lies a wide and contested middle ground: private offices, concierge arrangements, specialist departments within advisory firms, and what Harris wryly described as "one bloke in a garage looking after a family."

Richens resisted the temptation to anchor the definition to a wealth threshold, arguing instead that family offices come into existence through complexity rather than quantum. The trigger is the moment a family — whether through a liquidity event, an inheritance, or the accumulation of assets across multiple structures and jurisdictions — no longer has the time or the expertise to manage its own affairs. "At that point," she said, "they need to get some help in." French noted that in the offshore context she is most familiar with, the structure often sits within a corporate services provider, where a relationship manager, administrator, lawyer, and tax adviser collectively function as the family office without any standalone entity. One Manx client — a large Israeli family — was the only client of an accountant employed by the firm for that purpose alone. Harris added a further nuance: for private equity firms and other institutional investors, a family office typically means one holding liquid assets in excess of £50 million. But estates, property portfolios, and business interests held in illiquid form complicate any such threshold considerably.

Structure, Jurisdiction, and the Accidental Family Office

Sinha described the typical architecture of the single family offices he encounters in his practice — usually in the context of a divorce, which provides an unusually forensic perspective on how these structures are actually assembled. A private trust company sits at the top, with a series of trusts below it, holding companies beneath those, and the assets divided across dedicated vehicles: one for luxury assets such as aircraft and art, one holding the family office's own operating entities, one for investment portfolios, one for property. Jurisdiction combinations in recent mandates have included Switzerland, Cayman, Singapore, and Luxembourg simultaneously. "That's by no means a blueprint," he added. Richens offered the counterpoint: many family offices simply happen by accident — a trading company winds down, cash accumulates, a property business sits alongside it, and suddenly there is a structure that functions as a family office without anyone having designed it that way.

The panel was broadly cautious about overseas structures for the sake of it, particularly for families whose wealth is primarily domestic. "It's quite easy to export yourself as a person," Richens observed. "It's really difficult to export a structure." A trust or company already established in the UK can be extremely costly and complex to relocate, making the question of domicile at inception more consequential than it might appear. French noted a countervailing consideration: the Isle of Man's perpetuity period has been abolished, meaning structures can continue indefinitely — but even that advantage needs to be weighed against the ongoing demands of economic substance, OECD reporting frameworks, and jurisdictional adaptability. The consistent preference expressed across the panel was for stability and access to reliable courts over tax efficiency alone.

The Three-Generation Problem and the Family Charter

Harris drew on his academic  research into intergenerational wealth transfer to introduce what he called the "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves" problem — the well-documented phenomenon, observed across cultures from the United States to Japan, that approximately 70% of family wealth disappears by the third generation. His research identified two consistent drivers of families that buck this trend: the closeness of relationships, often anchored by a shared business or legacy asset that creates common purpose; and the pattern of giving, with families who transfer wealth gradually and regularly across a lifetime producing far more financially capable heirs than those who transmit large sums on death. "If they get huge amounts of money on death, that's when they quite often go a bit crazy," he said, with the practitioner's blend of candour and tact.

The practical response his firm often sees is the family charter — a document that precedes any legal structure and articulates what the family stands for, what its common goals are, and how disputes will be resolved. New members of the family, including the third generation as they come of age, must engage with and sign the charter before they participate in any governance structure, prenuptial negotiation, or trust distribution. Richens endorsed the concept strongly: "Not enough families have them. Even if it's just the exercise of getting the family together to discuss common goals and values — what are the crunch points, what will people fall out about, how will those fallouts be resolved." French clarified the legal status: family charters are not binding contracts, but they provide the principled foundation from which legally binding instruments — prenuptial agreements, directors' service contracts, letters of wishes — are then derived. Sinha noted their particular value as a vehicle for having the conversations wealthy families most often avoid: "Families, in my experience, quite often want to swerve" the sensitive topics. A family governance process creates the context in which those conversations become structured and expected rather than threatening.

Divorce-Proofing the Structure

Sinha's final contribution brought the session to its sharpest practical edge. For family office clients with complex, multi-jurisdictional structures, prenuptial and post-nuptial agreements are necessary but insufficient on their own. The real challenge is building divorce resilience into the structure itself. English courts have two principal routes into offshore trusts: a "resources" argument, where the court is satisfied that trust distributions will continue to a beneficiary and orders a lump sum on the basis the trust is likely to assist in meeting that; and a "nuptial settlement" argument, where the court can vary the settlement  — adding or removing beneficiaries, ordering payments, even creating sub-trusts. "Theoretically," Sinha said, "the court's discretion is unfettered."

The protective response he recommended as an example could be the deliberate creation of sub-funds or sub-trusts earmarked specifically for individual beneficiaries, cross-referenced in the letter of wishes, so that in the event of a divorce the trustees can point the court to a defined and contained pot rather than leaving the entire structure exposed. French reinforced the offshore perspective: UK courts cannot compel offshore trustees to submit to proceedings, which provides meaningful protection — and the discipline of not including a spouse as a beneficiary of the trust in the first instance removes one of the most common vectors of attack. It was, in many respects, the ideal note on which to close a day that had ranged across tax, relocation, succession, pensions, and private capital: a reminder that the structures professionals build for their clients are only as resilient as the thought that went into designing them for the long term.