Insights
By: Mark McMullen
Is the rise of the single-family office a good thing for our business?
The single-family office market is growing, having increased in size by 200% over the last decade1.
Although some may see this fragmentation of the market as a threat to the more established firms supporting multiple clients, it is anything but, according to Mark McMullen, CEO of Stonehage Fleming’s Family Office division.
“Some of our best clients are single family offices – private entities established to manage an individual’s own family wealth” he says. “What some may see as something of a cuckoo in the nest, is a benefit in reality. When you deal with a single-family office, you're generally dealing with a high calibre person or team of people who already understand the way we look at the world and what we are trying to achieve for our clients.”
Advisers who understand the family office landscape are able to both hit the ground running in terms of their professional knowledge and enable a more ‘frictionless’ interface with the underlying client, adds Mark.
“If you deal directly with a family instead of their family office, you often spend time explaining the fundamentals. This includes the fact that we are quite ‘fiduciary’ in the way we think, how we incorporate risk and compliance, the different perspectives of a cross border approach or what it means to act as a trustee,” he explains.
Furthermore, our clients are typically time poor, often running their own businesses and many with personal and professional interests spread around the world. “It is not uncommon that clients would rather delegate answering trustees’ questions about a given investment or the requirement to make a distribution.”
In his client work, Mark notes two trends contributing to the rise in single family offices. The first is that younger family members are increasingly interested in adopting a more professionalised approach to managing their assets.
“The Next Gen is increasingly international in its outlook. They notice the same trends in the US and UK whereby families are running their affairs in a much more structured way. They learn about family offices in business schools and read about the issues around wealth transfer in the news. Establishing a single family office can be the first step in the devolution of responsibility to smaller groups within a family, rather than a single, central relationship.”
The other trend, says Mark, is towards wealthy families realising they can’t provide everything themselves in an increasingly complex wealth landscape, compounded by an always-on international lifestyle and stringent regulatory environment.
“In essence, a single-family office and multi-family office complement each other. We enable the single family offices to service their principal with the full range of global investment and family office services and a multi-jurisdictional presence on the ground. The really smart families avoid the expense of trying to create that themselves. For one thing, they recognise that their needs are likely to evolve over time. We already have the capability to respond to that.”
Mark McMullen joined the Stonehage Fleming Group in 2001 in Neuchatel, Switzerland. In 2009 he relocated to Geneva to establish and head-up the Geneva office, where he is currently based. From Geneva, Mark also oversees Stonehage Fleming’s Family Office businesses in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco, the UK, Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, South Africa, Mauritius, Israel, the US and Canada.
Mark holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and Post Graduate Diploma in Accountancy from the University of Cape Town, and is a qualified Chartered Accountant having completed his professional training with Deloitte and Touche (now Deloitte) in South Africa and the USA. He is a member of SAICA and STEP Affiliate Member. Mark was named as one of the eprivateclient 50 Most Influential in 2023 and 2024. It recognises leaders who provide the best possible advice and service for clients and who drive innovation in the way that meets their needs.
1 Capgemini World Wealth Report 2024