Helping phenomenal families to thrive in today’s challenging environment

For the second year, Standard Bank gathered a collection of insights from leading institutions, independent advisors and families in business. Across 23 episodes and over five weeks, the series unpacked the full spectrum of insights and what this means to those pondering, “What makes a family phenomenal?” The objective was to address the key issues and trends affecting family offices and family enterprises in today’s environment, and to create a collection of thought leadership content to help our families preserve and grow their wealth and leave a legacy for many generations to come. **Key Themes** **Trust** Working and collaborating with the right advisors, colleagues and partners has never been more important. Trust is built over time and destroyed in an instant. The impact of strong levels of trust can free decision-makers to take action swiftly and with a greater degree of confidence. Decisive actions over the past two years have been crucial to building and maintaining legacies. **Connectivity** Access to timely insights, the best advice and other business owners has made the difference between surviving and prospering during the pandemic. **Sustainable Focus** A widely used term, more so in the past five years, which means different things to different people. For families in business, it is often about enduring and adapting, about benefiting collective stakeholders as well as shareholders. What does this mean for families and Standard Bank’s Family Office clients and UHNWI private investors, who have expressed a desire for us to play a super co-ordinator role connecting business opportunities between client, capital, expertise and our network? Some of the themes that have emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic include a significant increase in risk appetite among high-net-worth investors and wealthy families looking for diversification of their wealth, while still protecting and preserving that wealth. One of those opportunities was in the form of directly held private equity investment. What was motivating many of these families seemed to be driven by an underlying entrepreneurial confidence and experience in running their own businesses, and of course the desire to search for higher-yielding and more exciting returns versus returns achieved through traditional asset classes such as equities and real estate. Some clients believe their own personal business experience gives them an advantage over the professional investment community and are now starting to consider co-investment prospects with other “like-minded” families to share in “off-market” opportunities and to de-risk. However, this sounds far easier in theory than it is in practice. The challenges that clients come across almost without exception are gaining access to deal flow, alternative asset classes and appropriate networks that they trust. Standard Bank has proven to be valuable to our clients in playing the role of super co-ordinator of relationships and introducing high-quality opportunities, to which we are exposed by virtue of our interconnectedness and the ecosystem of deep financial expertise that we enjoy within the Group. Connecting parties is where we see the role and vision of our Global Family Office. We believe that one of our strongest competitive advantages is our ability to engage a significant client base across 20 countries, to create and facilitate a platform for peer-to-peer engagements to do meaningful business and to share insights and experiences. With that in mind, and based on the immense feedback we have received from one of our content pieces from the _Phenomenal Families Series_, we have subsequently established a Global Investment Club, which is designed to bring deal flow and opportunities for private investment to the fore.