By 2021, over 80 percent of businesses had adapted to digitization but, as a Deloitte study reported, as of February 2025, nearly 75 percent of family offices are underinvested or minimally invested in technology. This dichotomy means that while a multinational business may be thriving, a family’s wealth, especially when tied to such a business ownership may be at risk of partial and perhaps, complete loss in succession without innovation. As global markets adapt rapidly to technological changes and economic shifts, family-held businesses are at risk of becoming obsolete and the succession of the family’s wealth disappearing. Traditional estate planning techniques, models, and assessments need to evolve with the changing risk management metrics for the businesses that built and grow the family’s wealth. Decentralized platforms, digital currency, investments in emerging markets, and the increasing integration of AI challenge many of the traditional methods of wealth planning tools and structures.
Innovation in wealth strategy
Family offices have been growing rapidly and investments have innovated strategies to grow with the quickly shifting economic landscape. Where wealth preservation was the primary focus point, wealth growth has come to the forefront with opportunities in alternative investments, private equity, venture capital, and impact-driven investments. Structuring these investments and maximizing these opportunities have not kept pace. Estate planning is focused on post-mortem impact modeling for estate tax exposure. Innovations in investments focus on the present and a shifting global economy, highlighting the critical need for planning in an era of uncertainty. Balancing the generational priorities which can be focused on rapid income generation for the younger successors to preserving legacy and familiar investments for the older wealth-holders involves a delicate balance of income tax and estate tax benefits with risk allocation, going beyond traditional solutions involving less flexible dynastic trust structures as some of the primary planning devices.
Using traditional models as a foundation for innovation
In addition to the shifting global economy, the ever-changing geopolitical landscape implementing and eliminating tariffs from one day to the next creates new challenges in establishing multigenerational wealth preservation strategies. For example, a spousal trust may be considered typically to shift estate tax exposure for the family while providing access to wealth to the spouse, however, shifting residency and domicile considerations for each wealth-holder or beneficiary can drastically change models that focused on some certainty with location of the family or their businesses.
Dynastic planning should ideally incorporate sufficient flexibility to ensure any irrevocable trust structures do not implicate foreign trust tax and administrative burdens especially when those benefiting from the trusts obtain multiple citizenships, change residencies, or expatriate. Incorporating sufficient tiers of ownership and asset allocations both between types of instruments and jurisdictions can provide the balancing necessary of income and estate tax benefits with flexibility for investments.
Evolving role of leadership innovation with global investments
Investment and tax-efficient estate planning strategies would be amiss without proper governance and leadership succession. Traditional roles in family governance are shifting and priorities of the succeeding generations may not align with prior generations. Implementing adaptive leadership models that are beyond hierarchy and include comprehensive understanding and adaptation to cross-cultural communications and global conflict resolution can keep family wealth intact for generations and survive global changes in economic investments and family dynamics.
Modern tools in technology have to be integrated not only on the business operations end but also in managing families, their relationships and their wealth to fully preserve and grow assets for future generations. Adapting traditional and proven estate planning with modern tools and strategies focused on innovation in governance and investment is critical to preserving legacies built over generations.
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