Family Offices & Select: the family-group consultancy model

Insights

Why Select’s family-group fee model, multi-entity Connect access and ability to coordinate across retained external managers make it well suited to the practical realities of family wealth

4 mins

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Select Specialist Select Connect

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Author

Tom Wiseman

CEO

Tom is the Chief Executive Officer of Enhance Group overseeing our multi-jurisdictional Monitor and Select solutions from our Jersey headquarters.

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Family wealth typically sits across multiple entities: trusts, foundations, companies, and individual family members, each with different tax positions, beneficiary cohorts and time horizons. Select is built for this. Clients are grouped on a family basis for fee tiering, and Connect access is provided to all family members and their professional advisers. This article explains how the Investment Consultant advises across the family group, and how the integrated picture, including any retained external managers, gives the family a single coordinated view.

Why family wealth needs different investment governance

Family offices, single-family and multi-family, occupy a particular position among investment governance arrangements. They are larger and more sophisticated than typical trustee portfolios, but smaller and more constrained than institutional asset owners. They often operate across multiple trust structures, foundations and holding companies, each with its own tax position, beneficiary class and time horizon. And they often coordinate professional advice across multiple jurisdictions. What family offices share is a need for investment governance that fits the way family wealth exists, rather than forcing it into the shape of a generic trustee engagement. Single-style investment managers struggle here. Per-entity fee structures penalise families for the way their wealth is organised. And single-platform implementations that ignore retained external managers leave the family with a fragmented picture. Select is built around these realities.

The most distinctive feature of Select for family offices is the family-group fee model. Clients are grouped on a family basis when applying investment minimums and the consultancy fee tier, so the combined assets across all entities determine the tier, and every entity benefits from it. A family with multiple trusts, foundations or operating companies pays a single tiered fee on the family-group total, rather than separate per-entity fees priced as if each were a standalone client. Connect access is similarly extended on a family-group basis. This gives trustees, family members, lawyers and accountants within each group the same source-of-truth investment view, with the Investment Consultant running the relationship across all entities in the group.

Family-group consultancy does not mean one-size-fits-all portfolios. Each entity within a family group has its own investment policy statement, risk profile, time horizon and portfolio, constructed from the IC-approved universe. What is common across the family is the discipline: the same 5P research process applied to the funds in every portfolio, and the same Investment Committee approving the universe. The same Investment Consultant provides relationship continuity too, which matters more in family-office contexts than almost anywhere else. Family wealth is multi-generational, and arrangements that change every few years make it harder to compound discipline over time.

Family wealth grows and family structures evolve. Select is built to scale with the family rather than against it. New entities can be added to an existing engagement at any time: a new trust for the next generation, a new foundation, a new operating company. The family-group fee tier captures the additional assets, and the Investment Consultant takes on the new entities as part of the existing relationship. Where the family has retained external manager relationships, specialist mandates, generational holdings, or illiquid assets, Connect provides the coordination layer. The Investment Consultant’s recommendations take account of the externally held exposures across the family group.

Onboarding a family group in practice

Bringing a family group onto Select follows the same five-stage journey as any other client: objectives evaluation, investment policy, manager selection, portfolio structuring, review meetings. The difference is that it runs at both the family level and the individual entity level. The Investment Consultant typically begins with a family-level objectives conversation. This establishes the shared context: the family’s overall risk appetite, the generational time horizon, and any values-based constraints that apply across the group. It then moves to entity-level objectives evaluations that capture what is distinctive about each trust, foundation or company within the group. Each entity ends up with its own signed IPS and its own portfolio. But the family-level context ensures the entity-level decisions are consistent with each other, rather than arrived at independently by different advisers with no visibility of the wider picture.

Three practical configurations for family-office wealth

Full family-group consolidation: all entities operate on Select under a single relationship, with a consolidated Connect view. Select plus existing managers: some portion of the family’s wealth runs on Select, while specific external relationships are retained for legitimate reasons, and Connect monitors both. Phased family-group migration: specific entities move to Select first, typically those with the clearest case, while others remain with their existing arrangements pending review. In all three, the family-group fee tier applies across the consolidated relationship as it grows.

What family office boards typically ask

Family-office board conversations about Select tend to return to the same three questions. What does the engagement look like for family members least involved in investment decisions? Connect access and reporting are calibrated to each individual’s appropriate level of involvement. How does Select handle generational transition? The Investment Consultant relationship is designed to span generations, as family members age, retire or pass on. And does Select work for this particular family’s combination of jurisdictions and structures? That question is best worked through directly with an Investment Consultant, given Enhance’s multi-jurisdictional experience and the platform’s capacity to handle multi-currency, multi-jurisdictional client structures.

The bottom line

Family wealth is genuinely complex, and the investment governance arrangement that fits a single trust rarely fits a multi-entity family group well. Select is built around the realities of family wealth: a fee model that rewards consolidation, governance that applies consistently while allowing each entity its own policy, and a structure that scales as the family grows. For family offices evaluating their investment governance arrangement against the demands of family wealth itself, Select is the model designed to handle the actual problem.

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