What does a sophisticated Family Office cost? Jeremy Arnold discusses the average volume of liquid assets required and the challenges some families face.
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If you are moving into the more sophisticated end where you're starting to manage investments and there's a whole infrastructure required, the costs can be very significant. Clearly you've got to have the liquidity to pay the bills and I sometimes think a rule of thumb is probably about at least 1% of the liquidity that a family has that's needed to support a family office. But as a rule of thumb, if you've got an accountant, a lawyer, an investment professional and so on, you may need liquid assets of over £300 million or $500 million and those are very significant sums. I think one of the challenges is really with families that have somewhat less money at least that's liquid than those amounts I've just talked about and how they form an infrastructure themselves and there is a requirement to do that. That's maybe where you have a sort of 'virtual family office' and you have a group of professionals, or you may have a partner at Withers for example performing that role, and we do see that quite often.