Every business family that reaches a third generation acquires roles that no organisation chart quite captures. Marco Poon, a third-generation member of a major Hong Kong business-owning family, describes his own in a single word. Within the family he handles finance and legal work, and he calls himself a gatekeeper. His conversation with Michael Macfarlane on Wealth Office offers a view of what that role involves, and of how it connects investment, governance and the preparation of the next generation.

From factory to platform

Poon's family story follows a familiar Hong Kong arc. His grandfather started a factory. His father's generation developed it into a bigger platform. Poon's own focus is investment and family governance, which he describes in terms of keeping the platform together and integrating its resources. The family invests in financial markets and, through venture capital, in startups.

The word platform matters. A factory is a single enterprise. A platform holds several activities and several generations. Keeping it together is a different task from running any one part of it, and it is the task Poon has taken on. He frames the purpose of family wealth in the same terms.

It is about ensuring the survival of the families. It's about cultivating the next generation. It's about developing the family into the next platform.

— Marco Poon, Wealth Office

Read as a job description, those three sentences set the gatekeeper's priorities. Survival comes first. The cultivation of people follows. Growth is defined as building the next platform, which implies that each generation is expected to leave the structure larger and more capable than it found it.

What a gatekeeper keeps

In Poon's account, the gatekeeper's most immediate work concerns the family's relationship with financial institutions. Families, he argues, arrive at banks with a bracket of needs that includes governance and charity as well as investment. Banks are built around investment, earning revenue from product commissions and trading, and staff KPIs centre on portfolio revenue. Anything else, he says, becomes an additional cost unless the family pays for it. Raising family governance with a private banker, he adds, produces a silence in which you can hear a pin drop.

A gatekeeper in this sense stands between the family's broad needs and the narrower incentives of the institutions that serve it. Poon carried that thinking into JCP, the fiduciary advisory business he founded on a net-fee model. He describes a practice in which commissions offered by banks are disclosed to the family and negotiated away to reduce its net cost. The principle is that the family should be able to see what it is paying and why.

He also places the gatekeeper inside a wider community. Poon describes a peer group in Hong Kong where family members, mostly second and third generation, discuss governance, tax, trends in charity and how to teach children about money. Each family is unique, he observes, but the challenges are similar. Part of the gatekeeper's work, on this view, is bringing what other families have learned back into his own.

Decisions as the unit of governance

The most distinctive element of Poon's account is where he locates governance. He founded JCP, he says, to improve the quality of families' decision-making. The firm helps families establish investment committees, trains them to make decisions within those committees, and offers education and succession planning, so that investments are judged against the family's own objectives.

This treats governance as a practical discipline exercised one decision at a time. A committee gives a family a place where proposals are tested against its purpose, and training gives members the ability to take part. In a platform spanning generations, that discipline is what allows resources to be integrated without any single member acting alone.

Poon's own preparation for the role came partly from outside finance. He describes two routes to making successors battle ready. One is a period in a third-party organisation, where heirs learn what a 9-to-5 job, pressure and chasing a sales order feel like. The other is a family-funded entrepreneurial project. His family let him pursue entrepreneurship, and he says it helped him understand the operational challenges the family faces. For someone whose role is to weigh decisions on behalf of a platform, that operational understanding is part of the qualification.

A gatekeeper who can be overruled

Poon also tells a story that tests the role. A few years ago he recommended that his family invest in US bonds, an idea 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 concluded that he had been applying an institutional lens to a family thinking 100 or 200 years ahead, and he says he remains glad the idea was rejected.

The episode shows the gatekeeper inside the governance he helps to build. His recommendation went to the family, the family weighed it against its own experience of geopolitics and time, and the family decided. A gatekeeper who manages the process does not own the outcome.

That distinction runs through Poon's view of the family as a whole. He argues that families must pass down values, stories and an understanding that members manage the family's wealth without owning it. Patient capital follows from the same outlook. Families may have no fixed investment horizon, which he sees as suited to startups and to infrastructure such as the power grids he believes need overhauling to meet the energy demands of AI.

In a third-generation family, the gatekeeper's role as Poon describes it is to keep the platform together, keep its decisions honest and keep its members prepared, while the family itself remains the decision-maker. His closing emphasis on stewardship applies to the gatekeeper as much as to anyone else.