Families advised to get governance right ahead of $83tn wealth transfer
富豪家族需提前做好财富治理

“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”

That maxim haunts wealthy matriarchs and patriarchs around the world: describing the risk that hard-won entrepreneurial riches end up being squandered after they pass to grandchildren. And research shows that there is truth in it: 70 per cent of families that create wealth have lost it by the second generation, and 90 per cent lose it by the third generation, according to a 20-year research project by US-based consultancy Williams Group.

All too often, matriarchs or patriarchs simply fail to think beyond tax planning and end up with no infrastructure for a successful wealth transfer. Consequently, nest eggs get devoured by lawyers as siblings squabble — and end up back in shirtsleeves.

However, that succession infrastructure can be established by family governance — a parallel to corporate governance, but not as well understood as it involves less disclosure. While corporate governance is reported and covered by government regulations, family governance is, by contrast, opaque — except for the occasional court fight. Best practices tend to be passed on by word of mouth.

There are similarities between these two types of governance, though. A family constitution, for example, acts much like a corporate charter. Also, adding independent board members to family-controlled businesses helps to pierce some of the groupthink, just as it does in larger corporate boardrooms. And family councils, comprising a subset of family members, can represent wider stakeholders to help make decisions for everyone, as advisory boards do within some companies.

For some families, there can be as much at stake as in any corporate deal. A whopping $83tn is expected to be transferred to the next generation in the next 20 years — much of it in the next 10 years — UBS said in July, in its annual wealth report.

That can make getting started on family governance seem daunting, says Babetta von Albertini, chair of the Institute for Family Governance, which offers case studies of how family problems can be resolved without litigation. “The hardest thing is to get the patriarch or matriarch to do something,” she explains.

Von Albertini cites one case in which a patriarch worth about $3bn had done no estate planning and simply expected his oldest child to step into his shoes. Not surprisingly, that did not go down very well with his other children.

One of the first steps for wealthy families is to create a family constitution, advises Thomas Thiegs, a managing director at Ascent, a division of US Bank. He suggests this should set out answers to questions of control: “What types of roles will family members have? What is our structure for the board of directors? How many seats do we have?”

Thiegs says: “We give [families] a road map that gets them from barely any structure or centralised decision-making to this group decision-making and governance process.” However, he adds: “It does take years to put that in place.”

A further step can be to establish a family council. This is, essentially, a group of family members picked to represent the larger cohort. It can include family members who are on the board of a family company as well as others.

“That is a structure that we like because it lets people have their opinion and voices heard but it also provides for that more formal decision-making for managing the business,” says Thiegs. “The [family] owners still have a way to provide that feedback to the business.”  

An even broader set of family members can comprise an assembly, where views may be aired. This group can include cousins and people who have married into the family over the decades. These individuals still need a voice with the family and its businesses, but they might not have decision-making authority.

Von Albertini believes family governance structures like these can act as checks and balances to protect wealth. For example, protective committees can be established to oversee financial advisers as well as family members who might be young and are unfamiliar with finances. These protective committees — which, typically, include an outside lawyer — give family members leeway to make “affordable mistakes” with money.

In one example, cited by von Albertini, a father gave up control of a slice of the family wealth to a young daughter with little financial experience — but this allowed her to make impact investments that she felt passionate about.

“It has a purpose to train the family member and empower her,” von Albertini suggests. “The bankers have to go through her family office. The protective committees are a way to train the next generation.”

Family governance can also deal with bad blood between siblings. In business relationships, when disagreements get messy, people can walk away. But wealthy family members cannot cut ties as easily.

In these situations, Doug Baumoel, a family business consultant, reckons the solution is greater familiarity. “If there is one treatment for family business conflict, it is when family members get to know each other better,” he says. “That increases predictability in the system.”

Some believe the reason that disputes often arise in wealthy families is because the children do not spend enough time together when growing up — so they do not develop the same connections to their siblings that middle-class families have. In wealthy families, one child might go off to horse riding camp, for example, while a sibling goes to sailing school.

“When family members don’t know each other well, mistrust develops,” Baumoel warns. “They have not had the opportunity to fight and heal and compromise because they have not had to.”

But there can be simple solutions, Baumoel points out. “I know one family, they live in this very big house, but they insist their two young kids share a bedroom. For this purpose exactly.”