What counts as safe

Marco Poon tells a story that reframes risk for private wealth. A few years ago he recommended that his family invest in US bonds, a choice any private bank would have endorsed as very safe and very liquid. The older generation asked whether he had ever seen the balance sheet of the country issuing them. Poon realised he had been applying an institutional lens to a family thinking 100 or 200 years ahead, and he remains glad his idea was rejected. His elders, he concluded, had lived through multiple cycles and knew that what they were once taught was safe could go wrong.

They know that nothing is completely safe for the entirety of time.

— Marco Poon, Wealth Office

For Poon, time frame and geopolitical concern are the two core parts of how a family analyses risk. A bank may call an investment low risk because its volatility is acceptable over one, five or ten years. A family safeguarding resources for generations may prefer assets whose volatility it can ride out. He also describes a structural conflict of interest. Families bring banks a bracket of needs, including governance and charity, while banks are designed around investment revenue from product commissions and trading, and staff targets centre on portfolio revenue.

The cyber front line

The newest risk discussed on Wealth Office is digital. Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, suggests that family offices now hold wealth comparable to institutions with less infrastructure to protect it, which he attributes to cost more than carelessness. Multiple international bases, he adds, can offer jurisdictional protection while making an office more vulnerable the more widely it is dispersed. David Ferbrache OBE, Managing Director of Beyond Blue, says surveys suggest around a third of family offices experience a cyber incident each year. Criminal groups, he says, are moving from encrypting systems towards stealing data and using it for extortion, sometimes aimed at individual family members, and AI is improving their research and their impersonation.

Both guests see the small, trust-based family office as a mixed blessing. Hogan-Howe notes that the trust which reassures can also amplify an insider threat. Both see next-generation oversharing online as a source of intelligence for criminals, with physical as well as digital consequences. Ferbrache calls the resulting analysis pattern of life, and suggests simple measures such as avoiding geotagged images and posting after leaving a place. He argues that cyber security cannot be left to IT alone, that the starting point is identifying the crown jewels, and that principals should help think through worst-case scenarios because the hardest damage to repair is reputational and personal. Hogan-Howe starts from a blunt premise.

My suggestion is on cyber, assume it will happen and that they will get through, because if you think the opposite, then you're probably not going to take it as seriously as you might.

— Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe, Wealth Office

He recommends an initial assessment of gaps, advisers who work alongside the team, deputies to sustain a response during long incidents and knowing exactly whom to call in each jurisdiction. If the answer to that question sounds woolly, he says, work is needed. He also recalls a case in which a routine fifteen-minute data download ran for about four hours, a warning the organisation did not take as seriously as it might have. Time, in his view, is the most damaging factor once data and money start to leave.

Risk inside the family

Some of the most serious risks come from within. Philip Marcovici has seen elderly family members placed under undue pressure to change succession arrangements, and notes that women often end up with the money, because they tend to outlive men or through divorce. His remedy is preparation for every family member and a planning discipline he summarises as trusting nobody.

No one should be trusted, not because they can't be trusted. But if you take the approach and ask yourself, what are the things that can go wrong and you are really operating from that basis, it's a much safer way for everything to be planned.

— Philip Marcovici, Wealth Office

Marshall Jen adds that family disputes can freeze assets while they continue, despite a century of trusts and insurance, because people fight over emotion more than ownership.

Mobility that may not last

A final category of risk concerns movement itself. Marcovici distinguishes the mobility of wealth, of the entities that hold it and of the owner. Families with multigenerational plans need all three, he argues, including diversified ownership across family members in different countries, and he expects all three to become more restricted as exit taxes and limits on multiple citizenship spread. He describes the UK's removal of the non-dom regime without a sensible replacement as an own goal. Gary Hersham, by contrast, describes London regaining standing as a safe haven, linked to conflict in the Middle East and a sense of insecurity in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. He also describes a long-standing flight of capital, in which people bring money to the UK to buy property or art so that their capital sits in a safe haven.

Policy can also move faster than a business can adapt. Shield Xiao Dun, whose first company was hit hard by China's 2021 double reduction policy, says he understands many of the government's reasons but disagrees with how abruptly it was executed. He argues that clear long-term boundaries would let entrepreneurs plan.

Taken together, these conversations describe risks that are often slower, quieter and more personal than market volatility. Poon's elders, Hogan-Howe's advice and Marcovici's planning discipline share one habit. Each begins by asking what could go wrong over a long horizon and plans from there.