Family Offices Services

As UHNW families are going global, growing in size and complexity and making bolder investment moves, there’s more and more call for specialist family advice. At KPMG, Catherine Grum leads her team in making sure their needs are met, working alongside her counterparts in the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia. ‘If you have a small in-house team of family officers, each one is a cost to that family, but working with us it’s like a tap that we can turn on and off,’ she says. ‘We can bring in new expertise where appropriate.’

There is a desire for direct investments and an increase in investors ‘sharing risks’ with like- minded HNWs, Grum notes. ‘No family office is an island– we’re all partnering with other organisations in some shape or form. It might be one family office leveraging the real estate team of another family office, or we might share office space or regulatory processes.’

Grum says KPMG’s approach has proved especially attractive
to the entrepreneurs, but stresses that each client will bring individual needs: ‘The approach needs to be very carefully tailored – you need to understand what the family’s priorities are, managing risk and setting up in a way that is as efficient, streamlined and low on administrative burden as possible.’