Few areas of wealth management are as complex – or as consequential – as the handling of generational wealth. As the new generations are preparing to transfer trillions to their heirs, the demand for expert advice around succession planning, governance and family dynamics is reaching new heights.
As family offices are evolving and legacy businesses are professionalising, advisers who specialise in navigating these intricate transitions are becoming indispensable.
The Spear’s ranking of the best generational wealth and family business advisers includes individuals who advise on family governance, complex asset management, impact and philanthropy, legacy building and wealth stewardship. Some of our featured advisers also provide expertise to families wishing to establish a single family office, although they may not continue contributing to its operation.
Explore the other rankings within the 2025 Spear’s Wealth Management Indices:
- Best UHNW Wealth Managers
- Best HNW Wealth Managers
- Best Wealth Managers: Jersey
- Best Wealth Managers: Guernsey
- Best Wealth Managers: Singapore
- Best Wealth Managers: Switzerland
- Best Wealth Managers: Middle East
The best generational wealth and family business advisers mentioned in the Spear’s index help families define shared values, resolve conflict, and build the structures that will preserve both assets and relationships across generations.
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This year, our featured advisers have seen family offices gaining in scale to become sophisticated structures able to assist private clients with increasingly complex financial issues, including liquidity events and long-term strategies that are robust enough to change over time and generations, as family priorities evolve.
Click the links below to jump to a section of this article:
- Methodology
- The best generational wealth and family business advisers: some names to know
- The best generational wealth and family business advisers: the complete list
- Contact us
Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to The Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
The best generational wealth and family business advisers: some names to know
Lauri Oinaala
- Focus: Next-gen entrepreneurs
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: EY
‘Successful succession requires knowledge and passion, as well as advanced governance and an open-minded approach to innovation and change,’ says Helsinki-based Lauri Oinaala. An adviser to high-growth family enterprises in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, he also heads up EY’s global platform for the next generation of C-suite executives and board members.
Oinaala is well versed in family dynamics and helps family businesses find their purpose. He says his clients often have ‘a unique perspective on the role the family should play and the impact their businesses should aspire to make on society, and they are equally aware of the long legacy they want to uphold’.
Read Lauri Oinaala’s full profile at Spears500.com
Nic Arnold
- Focus: Tax and asset management
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: JTC Group
Nic Arnold joined JTC Group in 2021 as the UK head of JTC Private Office. The private office team provides consulting services and outsourced family office services. Arnold has a particular focus on the ownership of complex assets, such as aircraft, yachts and art. She also advises families on trust structuring and generational wealth transfer.
She says: ‘Our three key services are family governance, and I use the phrase quite broadly, because that is governance over the whole of family life. [The second is] luxury asset consulting, and the third is succession planning and next-gen education.’
Read Nic Arnold’s full profile on Spears500.com
Kedge Martin
- Focus: Next-gen and purposefulness
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: KM Advisory
Kedge Martin, who is promoted to Top Flight is this year’s ranking, is founder and chief executive of KM Advisory, an agency that works with individuals and families to resolve the issues that can come with sudden wealth or family business and succession disputes.
‘The biggest problem entrepreneurs often have after selling their businesses is finding a renewed sense of purpose,’ she tells Spear’s.
Read Kedge Martin’s full profile on Spears500.com
Zita Verbényi
- Focus: Curating family legacies
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: The Legacy Atelier
Having held senior roles with prominent family office conference producers for more than a decade, Zita Verbényi founded The Legacy Atelier in 2021. Described as ‘a cutting-edge legacy practice’, the firm aims to preserve, narrate and showcase family legacies via bespoke curatorial projects – including physical spaces such as a family museum – and through legacy and family identity workshops and other programmes.
Verbényi’s core focus is helping family enterprises and business families ensure the longevity of their legacy and ‘benefit from it to achieve further success whilst maintaining family harmony and mitigating the evaporation of their wealth.’ She says that ‘such projects are also ideal ahead of successions or a potential liquidity event.’
Read Zita Verbényi’s full profile on Spears500.com
The best generational wealth and family business advisers: the complete list
Contact us
- To apply for inclusion in The Spear’s 500, complete our submission form.
- For further information about rankings, please email research@spearswms.com; we aim to respond to all queries within two working days.
- For commercial enquiries and questions relating to enhanced profiles, please contact Commercial Director Shady Elkholy: shady.elkholy@spearswms.com
- To keep up to date with the Spear’s 500, subscribe to our magazine, newsletter and follow Spear’s on Linkedin and Instagram.
- If you have missed calendar deadlines for our research cycles in 2025, you can still register your interest for updates about upcoming research and rankings.
- Click here to order a print copy of The Spear’s 500.
