Families of significant wealth face three broad choices: rely on wealth management firms and investment banks; join a multi-family office (MFO), sharing an institutional platform with other families; or build a single family office (SFO) — their own staff, their own chief investment officer, their own P&L. Each model is legitimate. The mistake is choosing on trends rather than economics and governance. The Quantitative vs Qualitative Start with the numbers. The most credible

On April 1, 2026, the Australian Parliament passed the Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act, backed by both the Reserve Bank and ASIC. This is not an incremental change. It is the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of banking and financial markets. The forces driving this transformation are blockchain, tokenisation, AI, agentic distribution, digital legal contracts, and smart contracts. Together, they make possible what was previously unthinkable — fina

It was around 2012, in the offices of Chambers and Company, where, in the boardroom, there was a banner quoting an interpretation from the Art of War. The banner read, “Sun Tzu believed that a big force does not necessarily guarantee victory. Rather, victory lies in the concentration of forces, regardless of their size, and efficiency of their employment.” It stayed with me, and I have shamelessly borrowed from it since first seeing it. It captures the essence that across ind

Family businesses can look very different from the outside. Some are formal, with boards, advisers and documented plans. Others remain founder-led, guided by instinct, relationships and the daily presence of those who built them. Some are multi-generational Australian families. Others are families who migrated to Australia and built successful enterprises underpinned by different traditions around authority, communication, obligation and family responsibility. On the surface,

In a previous piece, "cohesion harmony" I kept returning to a simple idea, technology can reveal and aggregate ownership, but governance determines how assets are managed. In an environment where platforms, products, and access are plentiful, the true differentiator is cohesion—how effectively a family aligns people, information, and purpose to enable disciplined decision-making. This cohesion transforms a collection of assets and providers into something more enduring: a sys

“Technology shows you what you own. Governance determines what you do with it.” For Australia’s high-net-worth families, the real differentiator isn’t access or innovation — it’s the cohesion that binds people, data and purpose to create i'll call “cohesion harmony.” For decades, private banks and advisory firms competed on access — to deals, products and platforms. When I started, giving clients entry to wholesale funds was a major differentiator, and the menu was barely twe

For more than a decade, Australia’s Significant Investor Visa (SIV) program served as a bridge for Chinese high‑net‑worth families seeking a foothold in Australia. It was, at its core, a migration program — and so the ecosystem that grew around it reflected that. Migration agents, branded wealth products, and headline‑friendly funds dominated the landscape. The clients themselves were treated, too often, as passive participants: investors seeking a visa rather than strategic

It is time that we apply Occam’s Razor (the principle of solving problems and developing models with the simplest set of assumptions) and George Polya’s Principles outlined in his book “How to Solve It” to the Energy Transition. The national debate is focused on the relative cost of generation from very large infrastructure investments of great complexity. It is a common experience that large, complex projects will take longer and cost many times the estimated expenditure. Ma

One of the urgent challenges for the Australian community is to enable young people to acquire home ownership and to maximise the number of retirees who own their own homes at retirement. Among the many strategies that have been discussed, a theme of superannuation funds moving focus beyond the contribution phase to the full life cycle of members has been given impetus by the retirement of a large cohort of baby boomers. The following thoughts relate to another strategy optio