Family office is a job description that has never been standardised. Two firms with the same words on the door can do almost entirely different work, and a family that engages one while expecting the other spends the first year discovering the gap. There is no single standard definition of the term, and where a regulator defines it at all it does so for a narrow purpose of its own: the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s family office rule exists to place such a firm outside the definition of investment adviser under the Investment Advisers Act, and it does so only where the firm has no clients other than family clients, is wholly owned by family clients and exclusively controlled by one or more family members or family entities, and does not hold itself out to the public as an investment adviser. Outside a carve out of that kind the term covers everything from a single employee running a bank relationship to a large team with its own investment committee.
What does exist is a pattern. Read enough single and multi family office mandates and the same five lines of service keep appearing, in different orders and with different emphasis, but recognisably the same five. They are worth setting out, not because they are authoritative, but because they show exactly where a family office holds the relationship and where it has to reach outside the building for execution. That second point is the whole subject of this note.
The five lines that keep appearing
The first is property. Sourcing residential and commercial real estate, usually prime, usually off market, on the basis that the interesting transactions never reach a portal and are done through people who already know each other. The second is luxury assets: yachts, private aviation, art and collectibles, both the acquisition advice and access to the specialist lenders who finance them. The third is litigation funding and arbitration advisory, which sits in a family office because disputes over family assets are commercial problems before they are legal ones.
The fourth is executive protection and intelligence. Physical security for principals and their families, travel risk, background work on counterparties. It looks out of place next to portfolio management until you consider that the same office is often the only party with a complete picture of where the family will be and who is asking about them.
The fifth is corporate and fiduciary advisory, described almost identically wherever it appears: identifying, introducing and coordinating the right expert. Not doing the work. Finding who should, putting them in front of the family, and staying responsible for the result. This is the line that carries the other four, and it is the reason the family office model works at all.
Very few offices execute all five in house
A family office of a realistic size does not keep a marine finance specialist, an arbitration funder, a former intelligence officer, an off market property agent and a cross border tax structurer on the payroll at the same time, all under one roof, all busy. The economics do not work and the quality does not hold. What a good family office employs is judgment about which specialist to bring in, and enough technical literacy to supervise them once they are in.
That is not a weakness in the model. It is the model. The value the family pays for sits in the fifth line: the office holds the relationship, understands the family’s actual objectives rather than the stated ones, and takes responsibility for assembling and directing the specialists. The specialists are interchangeable in a way the office is not.
It follows that a firm offering itself to family offices has to be honest about which of the five lines it belongs in, and about which it does not. A provider who implies coverage of all five is either misdescribing itself or is a broker of other people’s capabilities without owning any.
Where the coordination usually fails
The fifth line fails in two directions, and both are visible from outside. In one, the office coordinates without technical depth: it introduces a competent specialist, receives a document it cannot read closely, and passes it to the family with an endorsement it is not in a position to give. The structure is then wrong in a way nobody detects until a bank, a buyer or a tax administration asks the first hard question, which tends to arrive years later and in the middle of a transaction.
In the other, the office reaches past its perimeter and does the work itself. This is the more expensive failure, because it is invisible while it is happening. A generalist drafting a holding chain across three jurisdictions produces something that looks finished, files correctly and holds together until the first cross border event. Then it emerges that the treaty position was assumed rather than analysed, or that the entity has no substance behind it, and the cost of unwinding bears no relation to what the work would have cost had it been done properly at the outset.
What prevents both is a specialist who states a narrow perimeter and stays inside it, and an office with enough literacy in each area to supervise rather than merely forward. The families who come through cross border transactions well tend to be the ones whose office knew which questions it could not answer and said so before the transaction, not during it.
Where Montclare sits on that map
Montclare works inside the fifth line, and inside one specific part of it: the corporate, fiscal and structural leg of a cross border position, with the Netherlands as the platform. Our work covers asset management, cross border holding structures, real estate transactions from one million euros upward, and the Canary Islands special zone as a low tax entry point into the European Union beneath a Dutch holding. Clients are private families, entrepreneurs and family offices, reached through the twelve international desks, all routed through Amsterdam.
Within that perimeter we are the single point of responsibility for designing and coordinating the structure. Every regulated or licensed activity is carried out by duly qualified professionals in the relevant jurisdiction, selected per mandate. Montclare is not a law firm, an accounting practice, a lender or a regulated investment manager, and it never holds, pools or moves client funds.
The firm is a boutique by design, built on quality over quantity, under a premise of confidentiality and discretion: a small number of mandates, each with genuine attention, rather than volume. That is a constraint on how many files can be open at once, and it is stated as one rather than dressed as a virtue.
The Dutch layer, and what it is for
The recurring technical request from family offices is a European holding layer above an existing structure. The work is holding design, treaty positioning, substance and governance, and exit strategy, including how the earnings stripping rule in article 15b of the Wet op de vennootschapsbelasting 1969, which is the Dutch implementation of the interest limitation rule in the European Union’s Anti Tax Avoidance Directive, shapes the right level of debt in the structure. None of that is exotic. All of it is unforgiving when done from a distance by someone who does not sit in the jurisdiction.
The Netherlands is used because it is a functioning corporate jurisdiction with a mature treaty network and a notarial system that documents ownership properly, not because it produces a low headline rate. Shares in a Dutch private company do not change hands informally: article 2:196 of the Civil Code requires, for the issue or transfer of a share, a deed executed before a notary whose place of business is in the Netherlands and to which the parties concerned are party, with no separate deed required for the shares placed on incorporation. A Dutch layer built for the rate alone is exposed to the general anti-abuse rule that the same directive obliges every member state to apply, and which is there precisely for the arrangements the other rules do not reach. A Dutch layer built for governance, treaty access and orderly exit withstands scrutiny.
Where a family office already has counsel in place, the Dutch and European leg is added alongside them rather than over them. That division of labour is set out in writing before work starts, and it is the subject of a separate note.
The Canary Islands gateway, and its limits
The Canary Islands special zone is the other structural instrument that comes up repeatedly. Article 43 of Ley 19/1994 sets the special corporate income tax rate at 4 per cent, and the article immediately before it confines that rate to the part of the taxable base corresponding to the operations the entity carries out materially and effectively within the geographic scope of the zone. Beneath a Dutch holding, and read with that restriction rather than without it, it is a genuine low tax entry point into the European Union.
It is also conditional in ways that a headline rate never conveys. The status attaches to newly created legal persons and branches entered in the official register of zone entities, and article 31 admits only those that keep their registered office and their effective management inside the zone, have at least one director, or in the case of a branch one legal representative, resident in the Canary Islands, draw their corporate object from the activities listed in the annex to the law, invest within their first two years at least 100,000 euros in Gran Canaria or Tenerife and 50,000 euros in the smaller islands in fixed assets situated and used there, create within six months at least five jobs in Gran Canaria or Tenerife and three in the smaller islands and hold that average headcount for as long as they use the regime, and file a descriptive memorandum of their activities which binds them once approved. An entity whose job creation and average headcount exceed the minimum may be admitted without meeting the investment figure, and that is the relief the article provides on that point.
The rate is capped as well as restricted. Article 44 applies it exclusively to whichever is the lower of the share of the base apportioned to zone operations and a ceiling of 1,800,000 euros for an entity meeting the minimum employment requirement, raised by 500,000 euros for each job above that minimum up to fifty jobs, and the benefit is further limited so that the reduction in the year’s gross tax liability against the general corporate rate cannot exceed 30 per cent of the entity’s net turnover. The same article treats operations carried out with, or paid through, persons or entities resident in non cooperative jurisdictions as not carried out in the zone at all. Nor does the regime run indefinitely: article 29 allows the incentives to be enjoyed for the six years immediately following the end of the validity of the European block exemption regulation or of whatever replaces it, limits authorisation to register to that same closing date, makes any extension depend on the state aid rules applicable to the Canary Islands, and conditions the survival of the zone on the European Commission’s periodic reviews.
The regime works for a family office client seeking European market entry backed by genuine substance. It does not work as a nameplate. That distinction is worth making early, because clients who arrive asking for the 4 per cent and nothing else are usually asking for something the regime does not offer.
What Montclare does not do
Of the five lines, Montclare covers no part of the second, third or fourth. We do not advise on yachts, private aviation, art or collectibles, and we do not arrange the lending against them. We do not fund litigation and we do not advise on arbitration strategy. We do not provide executive protection, travel security or intelligence work.
On financing we frame the investment, prepare the credit file and place it with licensed lenders and investors, covering acquisition, development, bridge and refinancing. Montclare does not lend directly, and the distinction is not cosmetic: a party that arranges credit and a party that provides it have different interests, and a client is entitled to know which one is sitting opposite.
Saying this plainly costs nothing and settles something. A family office deciding whether to introduce a client needs to know the perimeter before the introduction, not after. A provider who cannot describe the edge of its own competence has usually not found it yet.
Why the limit is the argument
The fifth line only works if the coordinator is trusted, and a coordinator is trusted on the strength of what it declines. An adviser who says yes to every question inside a family’s affairs is not demonstrating range; it is demonstrating that nobody at that firm is measuring the difference between what they know and what they are prepared to charge for.
The mandates that fit best are recognisable in advance: European market entry, real estate, financing, a Dutch holding layer above an existing structure, succession or asset protection planning that needs a European leg, or the Canary Islands zone as a low tax entry point backed by real substance rather than a shell. Everything outside that list belongs to somebody else, and the family office holding the relationship is better served by being told so.
This article is informational. It does not constitute investment advice, an offer, or an invitation to invest, and it is not a financial promotion. Regulated activities are carried out only by appropriately licensed parties.