02 — Wealth structuring and succession architecture

Wealth Planning & Structuring

We coordinate the entities, trusts, and cross-border structures that protect capital across generations — alongside, not in place of, the family’s legal and tax advisors.

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What this covers

Five fronts we cover in every engagement.

Entity and structure mapping: A clear map of every legal entity in the family’s structure — companies, trusts, foundations, holding vehicles, life insurance wrappers — with the purpose, ownership, governance, and reporting requirements of each.
Cross-border coordination: For families with assets, members, and residencies across multiple jurisdictions, we coordinate the specialists in each country and ensure the structures actually talk to each other.
Trust and foundation architecture: Working with selected trustees and counsel, we help design the long-horizon vehicles (revocable, irrevocable, foundations, PTCs) that match the family’s succession goals — and we keep them administered properly.
Insurance and wrapping strategy: Where appropriate, we evaluate private placement life insurance, deferred annuities, and similar wrappers as part of the broader plan — never as standalone product sales.
Document and beneficial-ownership infrastructure: A single, encrypted, version-controlled source of truth for the structure documents, beneficial ownership filings, and the reporting required across jurisdictions.

When families engage us on this

When it makes sense to begin.

Liquidity event followed by complexity

A founder’s exit creates entities, trusts, and accounts faster than any one advisor can coordinate. Six months later, no one knows what owns what.

New jurisdiction, new family member

A child moves countries, a spouse joins from a different system, a residency changes — and the existing structure was not designed for it.

Generational transition

The current architecture was built around a single principal. It needs to be re-designed for distributed decision rights, multiple beneficiaries, and a longer horizon.

How we work on this

The rhythm, in four phases.

01
Map

Build the full, accurate map of the family’s entities, trusts, jurisdictions, and ownership.
02
Diagnose

Identify fragility, redundancy, tax inefficiency, governance gaps, and reporting risk against the family’s goals.
03
Architect

Propose a revised structure with named owners, named trustees, and named counsel — and the steps to get there.
04
Coordinate

Run the implementation across the relevant specialists, then keep the architecture documented, current, and visible.

What we do — and what we don’t

The boundary of the engagement — written without ambiguity.

We coordinate, design, and modernize. We do not manage client assets, give regulated investment advice, provide tax or legal opinions, or act as your trustee, custodian, or accountant. Where those mandates are required, we identify, vet, and integrate the right specialists into your operating model.

We do

Mapping and modernizing the family’s structure across entities, jurisdictions, and beneficiaries.
Coordinating the specialist advisors (tax counsel, legal counsel, trustees) who hold the formal mandates.
Maintaining the document, compliance, and beneficial-ownership infrastructure.
Stress-testing the structure against succession, residency, and reporting scenarios.

We do not

We do not provide tax opinions or legal advice — those are issued by licensed specialists.
We do not act as trustee or fiduciary, but we help select and oversee those who do.
We do not draft binding documents; we coordinate the specialists who do.
We do not sell insurance, structured products, or any wrapper for which we receive a commission.

In more depth

The written version of the thinking.

A wealth structure is not a one-time legal exercise. It is a living architecture that has to survive new jurisdictions, new family members, new asset classes, and decades of policy change. Most structures we see were correct at the time they were built — and have not been re-examined since.

The pattern we see most often

A founder builds a holding company. A trust is established. A second jurisdiction enters the picture. A child moves abroad. An operating business is sold. A foundation is added. Each step is handled correctly, by a competent specialist, in isolation. Five years later, no single advisor has the full map. No one knows which entity owns what, which trust serves which beneficiary, or which jurisdiction has the most exposure.

We rebuild that map first. Then we work with the family’s specialists to retire what no longer makes sense, fix what is brittle, and design what is missing — so the structure matches the family that exists now, not the one that existed when the structure was first drawn.

Questions we hear often

Direct answers to the questions we hear most often.

Aren’t our existing lawyers and tax advisors already doing this?

They are doing parts of it, brilliantly, within their mandates. What is usually missing is the layer above — the architect that sees how the parts connect, where the gaps and redundancies are, and how the structure should evolve as the family does. That is the layer we provide.

Do you replace our current counsel?

No. We typically keep the family’s trusted specialists in place. Where a structure needs a counsel or trustee in a jurisdiction the family doesn’t yet work with, we help identify and onboard the right one.

How do you protect privacy across multiple jurisdictions?

We treat documents as one of the most sensitive assets in the operating system. Working files live in encrypted, jurisdiction-aware infrastructure under the family’s control, with auditable access. We never store structure documents in commodity cloud drives or generic email.

Can you help with cross-border moves and residency changes?

We coordinate them. The decision and the formal advice come from specialist counsel in each jurisdiction; our role is to make sure the structure, reporting, and family operations move with the principal, rather than breaking quietly behind them.

Related capabilities

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