We built this officefor our own family.
It keeps one investment policy covering all of the family's wealth, one statement of everything owned, and a written record of every decision taken. It watches the managers and what they charge. None of that is unusual; most family offices would claim the same.
The office now admits a small number of other families. It holds no assets, sells no products, and accepts no payment from anyone raising capital.
An office, not a firm.
The Wijk Investment Office is a family office. It was set up to look after one family's capital, and that family remains its first client. The only real departure from the usual arrangement is that it was designed from the outset to be shared with a few others.
The office does not hold assets, place trades, or exercise discretion over any account. For its work as an office it is paid a single fee agreed with each family and receives nothing else: no commission, no retrocession, no share of a portfolio's gains, and no payment from a manager, a platform or anyone raising capital.
When the office takes part in a private transaction alongside a family it does so as a principal, with its own capital at risk, and its terms are set out in writing beforehand.
None of this is a policy that could be relaxed for a particular opportunity. It is how the office is constituted.
What the office does.
The policy One document setting out what the capital is for, agreed before it is needed rather than during a fall.
The record Everything the family owns on one statement, updated monthly, each fund broken down to what it holds.
The managers Each one measured after charges against the index equivalent, and kept or replaced on what that shows.
The committee Four meetings a year, chaired by the office, with a paper circulated beforehand and a minute afterwards.
The estate The portfolio and the family's operating business assessed together, since the risks usually overlap.
Continuity A file complete enough for the family to act on if the person who built the wealth is not there.
What reaches an office.
Private transactions are rarely advertised. They move between offices, through people who have known each other a long time. This office sees what comes to it and what reaches the other family offices it works with, and it commits its own capital before any of them sees anything.
Shared, so that it can be better.
An office of this kind costs much the same to run whether it looks after one family or several: the same people, the same reporting systems, the same licence, premises and audit. A family building one alone carries all of it, which is usually why the size of a family determines the quality of office it ends up with.
This one was built for several families from the beginning. Sharing the cost lowers it, and it also lets the office employ people, run systems and reach transactions that a single family of this size could not sensibly justify.
A small number of families.
Some families here are setting up an office and would rather use one that already functions. Others have had one for years, and want an independent investment layer above it.
Admissionor write to the office directly