The history of the Family Office services is associated with the J P Morgan family or the Rockefellers. Currently, two thirds of the major families in the West use some form of Family Office services or choose other methods of structuring their assets.
The transformation after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 has created space for specialised companies in Central and Eastern Europe. We notice that the demand from our clients is shifting from solutions intended solely for their business towards meeting the needs of their families. .
The Family Office remains primarily a highly efficient tool for the long-term administration of family assets.
In building their wealth, families come into contact with various forms of corporate consultancy, private banking and similar services. They focus their attention mainly on the financial health of their companies, address their needs, take up new business challenges, or make their day by buying a property or yacht now and then. The experience shows that such decisions are usually adopted ad hoc by the family as necessary, depending on the current situation, without an effort to look at each transaction from a long-term perspective and within the context of the assets as a whole. Very often, the family relies on its immediate circle when conducting the transaction.
A family’s influence and power increase with its assets. This of course attracts various external factors that can, to a smaller or larger extent, start endangering the wealth.
Then, often after it has faced a particular problem, a smaller or greater risk, or after it just learns from the experience of others, the family finds out that its wealth that has been built for many years should be simplified and made more organised, that procedures should be set up to allow accumulating as well as efficiently protecting the wealth. Gradually, the family discovers that efficient asset management is not based on fast solutions but on incremental, systematic steps to arrange all of its assets.
The role of the Family Office is to help families with organising their assets, provide them with its know-how, arrange and organise all components so that the family obtains and sets up procedures for protecting it and developing its wealth.
Family Office services should not be viewed as a luxury toy. On the contrary, reasonable and qualified use makes these services an eminently practical guide and useful tool for preserving wealth across generations that are, from the perspective of a today’s family, yet to come.
