From the outside, a family office looks like a place where wealth is managed. From the inside, it is a place where mandates are run. The mandate is the unit in which work is done, reported, reviewed and invoiced. Defining it clearly gives you a structure; not doing so gives you a collection of folders.
What belongs to a mandate
The people: family members, attorneys, governing bodies. The entities: companies, family foundations, trusts, with their ownership relations. The assets: custody accounts at one or more custodian banks, real estate, non-bankable assets. The documents: contracts, forms, resolutions, tax records. The obligations: KYC reviews, reports, deadlines. And the agreed services, which determine what is reported and what is invoiced.
Mandate and structure
A mandate is not the same as an entity. A family can have twelve companies and two foundations and still be one mandate. Conversely, one company can matter to two branches of a family. The skill lies in modelling the structure inside the mandate cleanly and deriving look-through consolidation from it, instead of viewing wealth entity by entity.
Mandate separation
In a multi family office, separating mandates is the basis of the business. One family’s information must not surface with another, neither in conversation nor in the system. Technically that means access rights per mandate, separation at data level and logged access. Organisationally it means clear responsibilities and a four-eyes principle for sensitive operations.
Mandate management day to day
Clean mandate management shows in simple questions that can be answered at once: which review is due? Where is the current version of the articles of association? Who has access to which document? Which services were provided this month and not yet invoiced? If these answers require searching, the mandate is spread across tools, not managed.
Evidence
For audits, supervisors and the next generation, what counts is what is documented. A mandate with a continuous audit trail shows not only today’s state but how it came about. That is the difference between a structure that is lived and one that is recorded.