Michael Macfarlane puts a proposition to Philip Marcovici. Wealth, he suggests, is now more mobile than at any point in history. Marcovici accepts the premise with important qualifications. Mobility is a necessity for families planning over generations. It is also, he argues, a window that is starting to close. And it does not release wealthy families from the societies they belong to.

Three layers of mobility

Marcovici separates mobility into three levels. The first is the wealth itself, moving between countries and investments. The second is the entities that hold the wealth, whether a company in the British Virgin Islands, the Netherlands or elsewhere. The third is the wealth owner, and whether he or she can move from one country to another.

All three are mobile today, and Marcovici argues that all three need to be. Families worried about political risk, and about other events that could derail a multigenerational vision, need options. At the individual level that may mean more than one citizenship, residence rights in more than one place, and family members living in different countries. He describes diversification of ownership as being as valuable as diversification of investments.

His own career explains the emphasis. In Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, as Britain negotiated the return of Hong Kong to mainland China, he saw business-owning families fear expropriation and regime change. His work moved from companies to the families behind them, many of whom were moving family members to Canada or the US to obtain citizenship.

He then adds a warning. Most wealth and business owners, he says, do not fully understand their options or the limits to them. And the options are narrowing. Some countries impose exit taxes. Some, such as Singapore, do not allow multiple citizenships. He expects more countries to move in that direction, which has implications for any family planning very long term.

Macfarlane raises a counterexample from a London event, a founder who held much of his wealth in tokenised or crypto form, accessible only through a key he kept in his head. Marcovici's response is that digital assets are increasingly covered by transparency rules. They can play a role in planning, in his view, but they are not the one solution.

The optional society

Mobility raises a harder question, which Marcovici addresses in a chapter of his book on what a friend called the optional society. If a family can fly anywhere and live anywhere, does it need to embed itself in any society at all?

My conclusion is society is not optional for business reasons, for personal reasons, for every reason.

— Philip Marcovici, Wealth Office

He builds the argument from a simple test. A family whose wealth is meant to last more than one or two generations must ask whether its business can survive if the planet does not. His answer is no. From there, he says, any family thinking beyond a generation or two has to consider the communities and the planet around it, and what it can contribute. Moving around the world to avoid being embedded in society is, in his view, a strategy in which the family members themselves do not win.

He also points to history. Asian businesses, he notes, historically looked after their employees' health care and housing and cared for them even after retirement. That changed as societies came to expect governments to provide such things, paid for by taxing the wealthy, an arrangement he says is not working out the way it should.

What a trustworthy jurisdiction looks like

Asked which governments are getting it right, Marcovici refuses to reward low tax for its own sake. He will not name countries as good examples on the basis of giving wealth owners a free ride. His test is trust. A good government, in his account, offers wealth and business owners a secure place to run their businesses and raise their families, while building an economy that serves everyone. It creates a society where children can attend public schools and receive a great education and where public health is strong, so that families do not need walls and guards.

He names Singapore and Switzerland. In both, he says, wealth owners are largely respected for what they contribute, and they pay tax that is not the lowest in the world, accepting it because they receive long-term safety and security in exchange. He credits Singapore with smart, well-paid and capable people in government, and contrasts its public housing and public health with Hong Kong, which he describes as just as wealthy and of similar size but as having failed to create a fair society. He adds that Dubai and the UAE are getting it right in a different way, in part by benefiting from the failures of other countries.

The cost of an own goal

The UK is his clearest example of those failures. Marcovici does not defend the former non-dom regime, which he calls unfair and poorly thought out. His criticism is that it was abolished without anything sensible to replace it. He relays what one family told him.

What the UK is losing is our children and grandchildren who studied in the UK who would have used our family capital to invest in the UK and start new businesses.

— Philip Marcovici, Wealth Office

He describes former residents who now visit the UK as non-residents, carefully monitoring the number of days they spend there, and notes that he and other wealth owners use apps to count their days country by country. He also criticises the complexity of tax systems in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Complexity, he argues, makes a system unfair, because those who can afford advisers will always find cheaper options.

His broader prescription is what he calls a regenerative economy, supported by a regenerative tax system designed around what wealth and business owners can bring to society and how they can be part of it. The greatest achievements, he argues, come when governments and wealth owners work together in genuine dialogue, which he says is rare. For families, the implication is that mobility and belonging are both part of long-term planning. Neither can stand in for the other.