Successful family business owners are often involved with their company across several generations and can build up a significant fortune over the years. This needs to be coordinated and managed with foresight, which is why families today partially or completely entrust this function to a family office.
Management of a considerable fortune is a highly complex affair that comprises a range of services – advice on investments and financial questions, risk management, tax and inheritance planning as well as the coordination of various specialists. The principal goal is asset protection and growth along with legal compliance. Many families also make significant donations to charitable organisations or hold events for that purpose. To deal with all this properly requires multiple specialists – banks, tax consultants and lawyers are only a few of them. And seamless collaboration between them is key.
Secure, efficient and convenient
The highest priorities are the protection of the family’s private affairs and the confidentiality of their data. This applies regardless of whether the family office function is managed by the company’s finance director or entrusted to an external service provider. The highest security standards must be guaranteed across all levels of communication.
Even if an internal family office has its own IT infrastructure to avoid family issues getting mixed up with business activities, the manager needs to be able to communicate and share documents securely with advisors and lawyers and to store information securely. The same applies when an external family office communicates with family members or calls on specialists to help them make the right investment decisions. The data must be stored in an absolutely secure place, while remaining accessible to certain external people whenever necessary.
This challenge is no problem for the Brainloop CollaborationRoom solution. The web-based cloud solution provides a highly secure virtual workspace, known as a dataroom, in which family members and authorised external advisors can store, work on, save and securely send sensitive information and documents. And they can do so on any device with no need to set up a secure network, provide separate email encryption or install any dedicated software. That makes asset management efficient and secure, but also really easy to use. Many companies think so too – multiple leading enterprises and midsized firms as well as family offices trust Brainloop.
Digitisation of paper documents
For historical reasons, many documents only exist in paper format and are kept in safe deposit boxes. An additional copy may also be stored at a lawyer’s or advisor’s office. This makes their availability awkward for people who need them and also makes it difficult to control which business partners have access to which documents. This is a particular problem when the next generation takes over the family business. If you’re using a web-based collaboration solution such as Brainloop’s, in which data security is a top priority, it’s a good idea to digitise all the documents related to the family office. As well as providing a complete overview of all information, this also enables access to documents stored at a bank or in a tax advisor’s or lawyer’s office, helping to eliminate what was previously a “blind spot”. If you’d like to find out more about the digitisation of your documents, Brainloop would be happy to help you find the right service provider. Feel free to contact us about this.
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Written by Marion Haage
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