Consider a family whose office is run from Dubai. Its investments sit in Zurich, Singapore and New York. One child is studying in London, another is building a business in Lisbon, and the parents divide their year between two continents.
Twenty years ago, that would have looked unusual. Today, it is increasingly how family wealth works.
Most family offices are already international in how they hold assets. Around 88% hold bankable assets in two or more jurisdictions, and a third spread them across three. What has been slower to change is how families think about where the office itself belongs, and how that relates to where the family lives, which passports it holds and how wealth will pass to the next generation.
The latest briefing from the Global Intelligence Unit at Global Citizen Solutions, Family Offices: Best Jurisdictions Worldwide, puts numbers to that question. Its answer is clear: the place that suits the office is rarely the place that suits the family.
What is a family office?
Put simply, a family office is a private team set up by a family to look after its money and its affairs.
Most people call on a financial adviser, an accountant or a lawyer when they need one. A family office brings that work under one roof, working only for the family. It manages investments, but its role can also include property, tax planning and preparing for the day wealth passes to children and grandchildren.
Some serve a single family. Others, known as multi-family offices, look after several.
The idea isn’t new. The first modern family offices appeared in the 19th century, when fortunes made in the Industrial Revolution needed managing. What has changed is where they operate. Many families now have members, assets and interests in several countries at once, and their family office has to work across all of them.
Two questions, not one
When families choose a jurisdiction for their office, they usually start with the office’s needs. Is there a regime written for it? What will it pay in tax? Are the courts reliable? Are there enough bankers, lawyers and advisers to staff it?
These are the right questions. But they only make up a part of what should be considered.
The family has its own needs, and they are different. Can its members build residence there, and eventually citizenship? Can they keep the passports they already hold? What happens, in tax terms, when wealth passes to a spouse or child?
The briefing scores 33 jurisdictions on both sides separately: what each offers the office, and what each offers the family. Seen that way, a pattern emerges that a single ranking can’t show.
The office and the family rarely meet
Put the two scores side by side and they barely relate to each other. How a jurisdiction performs for the office says almost nothing about how it performs for the family.
The extremes make the point. The United Arab Emirates ranks second of 33 for the office and 28th for the family. Hong Kong ranks third and 20th. Portugal is the reverse: second for the family and 26th for the office. Argentina ranks sixth for the family and last for the office.
None of these is a poor choice. Each is strong at one job and weaker at the other.
Only six jurisdictions clear the midpoint on both: Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada, Australia and Germany. A family that wants one place to do everything is choosing from a very short list.
Why the two sides pull apart
The answer lies in how each side is built.
Part of what makes a good home for an office can be written into law. A government can create a family office regime and offer tax incentives within a single budget cycle, and many have. Hong Kong introduced its concession in 2023. India and Malaysia followed in 2025. In Dubai, the financial center now counts more than 1,400 family business-related entities, up 36% in a year.
The rest takes much longer: courts with a long track record, and a deep market of advisers, banks and other families. No statute can produce that quickly.
The family side follows a different logic altogether. It depends on nationality and succession law, which governments rarely design with family offices in mind.
Of the six jurisdictions that do well on both, only Singapore has a purpose-built family office regime. The other five got there largely through depth that was already in place. Even Singapore comes with a condition: anyone naturalizing there must first renounce their other nationalities.
More options than the headlines suggest
From the family’s side, the picture is more open than many expect. Twenty-five of the 33 jurisdictions offer a foreign family a route to citizenship. Twenty-one of those place no restriction on it and allow dual nationality, so nobody has to give up the passport they already hold.
Narrow the field to routes that lead to a strong passport and a low headline tax when wealth passes to a spouse or child, and nine remain. They include Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Uruguay, Canada and Australia.
The catch is that none of those nine has a purpose-built family office regime. The options exist. They just don’t sit in the same places as the centers designed for the office.
Geography plays a part too. All nine jurisdictions in the Americas offer a route to citizenship with dual nationality. None of the Gulf jurisdictions offers a route at all.
Designing for both
For many families, the practical answer is to stop looking for one place that does everything.
The office can sit where the regime and the professional market are strongest. The assets can be spread across several financial centers. And family members can hold residence or citizenship somewhere chosen for stability, mobility and the next generation.
As João Pacheco, Head of Institutional Client Relations at Global Citizen Solutions, explains:
“Families have diversified their assets for generations. What is new is that they are diversifying their citizenships as well, and those two decisions are increasingly taken by the same people at the same table.”
Families tend to reach this point for three reasons.
- Some want resilience, so that a change in one country doesn’t affect everything at once.
- Some want a structure built around rules they have chosen deliberately, rather than inherited by accident of birth.
- For many, the deciding reason is the next generation: the freedom to study, work and settle where they choose.
What matters is that these decisions are made together. This is the part of the picture Global Citizen Solutions works on: which residence or citizenship route, in which jurisdiction, and how it fits the structure a family’s tax and legal advisers are already building.
From one jurisdiction to the right combination
The briefing’s conclusion is simple. A family whose priority is the office is likely weighing Singapore, the UAE and Hong Kong. A family whose priority is status and succession is looking at Switzerland, Portugal and Italy. No jurisdiction appears on every list.
That isn’t a limitation. It is a more accurate picture of how international families now live.
The question is no longer where the family office should be. It is which jurisdictions should serve which parts of the family’s life, and how they fit together.
As Patricia Casaburi, CEO and Founder of Global Citizen Solutions, puts it:
