Asset Allocation Oversight
Most families have a portfolio. Fewer have a way of deciding. We put a framework around how your family invests: what it is trying to achieve, who is responsible for what, and why each decision was taken. Fixed fee, no commissions, and no investment advice.
A portfolio is the sum of its decisions. Few families can show how theirs were made.
What are we trying to achieve?
Who decides, and who checks?
Why do we hold this?
Three questions a family should be able to answer without calling its bank. Westwick partners have sat on investment committees and run family offices from the inside, and have seen what happens when the answers live in one person's head or in a manager's presentation. The review writes them down, with the family, and makes them hold.
Does one of these sound like you?
The families who call us about their investments usually recognise themselves in at least one of these.
Not there yet? Our partners have written about how families lose the thread of their own portfolio: Diversification or discipline.
Three things decide whether the family stays in charge of its own investments
Investment philosophy
The family's core investment objectives, written at a strategic level, and whether everyone who invests on the family's behalf understands them the same way.
- Objectives borrowed from an institution: a benchmark, a tracking error, a peer group. The family is not paid on any of them.
- A philosophy that exists in the principal's head and nowhere else. The managers work from what they assume it to be.
A short statement of what the money is for, written by the family, that every manager and adviser can repeat and every decision can be tested against.
Accountability
Roles and responsibilities within the family, the family office and third parties, from the sourcing of an investment through to its reporting.
- The same party sources, recommends, executes and reports. Nobody is paid to say no.
- The family signs what is put in front of it, because it was never agreed who else should look first.
A written map of who proposes, who decides, who executes, who reports and who checks. The person who checks is not paid on the transaction.
Decision-making
The process that records why the family invests, divests or reinvests, tactically and strategically, so that each decision can be held against the philosophy it is meant to serve.
- Decisions recorded as outcomes, never as reasons. Two years on, nobody can say what the thesis was.
- Exits that are never decided, only postponed. Reinvestment that happens by default because no one was asked.
Every material decision carries its reasoning, the conditions under which the family would reverse it, and a date to look at it again.
We give no investment advice. We do not recommend assets, managers or allocations. We build the framework within which the family and its advisers decide, and we stay out of the decisions themselves.
We manage no money and take no commission. A fixed fee, agreed before we start, is the whole of what we earn. There is no product to place and no manager to introduce.
We install no permanent layer. The framework is written to run without us. Once it holds, we leave.
How the review runs
Scope
A conversation with the family: what is invested, who is involved on both sides of the table, and what already exists in writing.
Review Fixed fee
Interviews with the family, the office and the third parties who invest for it. We read the mandates, the minutes and the reporting, and compare what was meant to happen with what did.
Framework
A written investment philosophy, a map of roles, and a decision record the family can keep without us. We walk it through with everyone who will use it, then hand it over.
“Pre-decide how the office behaves in a drawdown. When markets fall, a family with patient capital should be on the buy side, not the sell side. That stance is far easier to hold when it has been agreed in writing, in calmer weather, rather than improvised in a panic.”
Read the articleCan you answer these about your own investments?
Five questions we ask early in a review. Most families answer two or three with confidence. If the cost of running your portfolio is one of the things you cannot answer, our family office cost calculator gives you a starting figure.
Talk to a partner
A 30-minute conversation with a partner — not a business developer. Nothing to prepare, and no obligation on either side.
Your conversation will be with Aymeric, who will tell you frankly whether this review is the right place to start, or whether the audit should come first.
Asset allocation oversight is one of the reviews we offer, alongside the family office audit.
Questions families ask us
No. We do not recommend assets, managers or allocations. We design and test the process by which the family decides. The decisions stay with the family and its advisers.
The audit reads the whole office: structure, staffing, cost, allocation and governance, and tells you what to fix first. This review goes deep on one of those five areas and leaves a working framework behind rather than a list of findings. Some families start with the audit, some come straight here.
A fixed fee, agreed before we start, that depends on the number of parties involved and the state of what already exists in writing. No percentage of assets, no commission, no retrocession from anyone we deal with.
Not necessarily. A committee is one way of organising accountability, not the only one. What matters is that roles are written down and reasons are recorded. We work with what the family has, and say plainly if it is not enough.
In our experience, good ones welcome a client who knows what it wants and can say why. The framework gives them clearer instructions and a fairer basis on which to be judged. The ones who resist usually tell you something.
The framework belongs to the family. It can run it with its own team, ask its advisers to work within it, or ask us to sit through the first cycles until it holds. Nothing continues unless the family asks.
Book a 30-minute conversation
With a partner, not a business developer. We come back to you with a time.
Thank you. A partner will come back to you shortly to fix a time.