Why Wealthy Families Are Building Cross-Border Advisory Teams

For decades, wealthy families relied on a single trusted advisor to manage their financial lives. One person, one firm, one relationship. According to the 2025 Family Office Operational Excellence Report by AlTi Tiedemann Global and Campden Wealth, 57% of family offices now have at least one family member living outside the primary jurisdiction of the office, and 78% have opened offices in new jurisdictions in the last five years. The families went global. Their advisory structures are catching up.

One Advisor Is No Longer Enough

"Having professionals with various specializations and in the right jurisdictions, quarterbacked by an experienced person, is the key to achieving maximum success in your wealth management, asset protection, and tax optimization projects," says Jonathane Ricci, an international corporate attorney licensed in New York and Michigan with more than 25 years of cross-border experience. Ricci, who coordinates networks of legal, tax, real estate, and corporate professionals for clients across multiple countries through his firm JR Wealth Management, describes the single-advisor model as increasingly unfit for families with exposure in more than one jurisdiction.

It is a view echoed across the industry. "It is no longer about having one adviser or one lawyer," Jan Boes, an executive director at Swiss private bank Bordier & Cie, told a Hubbis wealth planning forum in late 2025. "Families want an integrated setup that can respond to cross-border, multi-asset, and multi-generational needs." That setup, Boes said, requires "legal specialists, trustees, private banks, accountants, and even educational institutions."

Coordination as a Discipline

Ricci's practice is built around what he calls the quarterback role: one experienced coordinator managing the interaction between specialists spread across different jurisdictions, ensuring that asset protection planning works as a single strategy rather than disconnected local fixes. "You need someone who can see the full picture," Ricci says. "A tax strategy optimized in one country can create liability in another if nobody is looking across borders."

Writing in EY's private client insights, partner Michael Parets has identified four areas that come up in client conversations regardless of geography: succession, purpose, tax reform and transparency obligations, and residency and mobility. Parets recommends families "completely review your global footprint" and appoint a long-term advisor who can "constantly monitor evolving family circumstances and tax positions" across jurisdictions.

Erik Christoffersen, who leads the family office practice at AlTi Tiedemann Global, put it in operational terms in the firm's 2025 family office research: "As families become more global and their needs more complex, many family offices are recognizing the benefits of outsourcing as they seek to deliver value for their families, including increasing global capabilities, next gen engagement, and keeping up with fast-evolving technology."

Building Structures That Last

Ricci's focus is on "creating structures that maximize tax efficiency, liability protection, and intergenerational wealth preservation." His firm recently formalized this through its ELITEWEALTH.LAW operating doctrine, a framework that integrates legal, tax, and advisory services to help families structure wealth compliantly amid evolving global regulations. The framework covers cross-border coordination, structural wealth defense through customized trusts and entities, and what the firm calls "post-fiat wealth architecture" for navigating sovereign debt concerns and digital asset taxation.

In a June 2025 analysis for Boodle Hatfield, private client partner Kyra Motley wrote that "legal structures have not kept pace with the complexity of modern wealth ownership, especially in cross-border scenarios." Getting it right, Motley argued, "requires careful, early planning, open dialogue, and bespoke legal architecture that reflects both the family's assets and aspirations."

Motley also pointed to geopolitics as a catalyst: "Geopolitical volatility has been a major catalyst for clients to review their global wealth structuring and ramp up asset protection measures. Clients are being more careful than ever about the jurisdictions in which they hold their private wealth."

Keeping Wealth Growing Generationally

For Ricci, the ultimate purpose of the coordinated model is "keeping your wealth growing generationally." An estimated $84 trillion is expected to change hands over the coming decades, the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. Families without coordinated wealth protection strategies across jurisdictions risk losing significant value to tax inefficiency, regulatory penalties, or structural gaps during succession.

Tom McGinness, formerly global chair of family business at KPMG and now group head of JTC Private Office, has written about the compounding pressures around these transfers. "Beyond the emotional concerns these transfers entail, tax, legal, and a host of other issues come into play," McGinness noted in research published with Campden Wealth. "Today, these issues are multiplying as geopolitical tensions run high, recession looms, and technology opens opportunities for new business models."

CRS reporting now covers more than 100 jurisdictions. FATCA enforcement continues to expand. Cross-border tax planning is getting harder to do well and more expensive to do badly. For families operating internationally, coordinated advisory teams are no longer a luxury. They are the cost of compliance.