ABSTRACT
Introduction Over the last decades, there has been an increase in the number of auent individuals in the Americas, Europe, and Asia (Beaverstock, Hubbard, and Short 2004; Rosplock 2014). Many of their fortunes originate from the complete or partial sale of a family business (a “liquidity event”), inheritance, ongoing entrepreneurial and investment activities, or “new” sources of private wealth based on work in the nancial services industry that has led to a client segment including, for example, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and corporate lawyers with high salaries and bonuses (Beaverstock, Hall, and Wainwright 2013; Wessel et al. 2014). Be they “old” multi-generational business families or new nancial elites, they are often served by family oces. These specialist institutions aim at nurturing the continuity, harmony, and coordination of the families and their businesses (Daniell and Hamilton 2010; Gilding, Gregory, and Cosson 2015) and exist in dierent forms: while a single-family oce provides services typically to a blood-related family, a multi-family oce may serve multiple, unrelated families (Decker and Lange 2013).
