Family Offices Expand Financial Protection to Include Physical Protection

The risks run from the fairly ordinary, yet difficult issues of severe illness, to extraction from, say, riots in Egypt; from kidnapping to ensuring that household staff is properly vetted, hired and managed. If being aware and alert to threats that could prevent a family catastrophe or if best practices can prevent or mitigate damage to a family’s reputation, then this service may be as necessary as car insurance for wealthy families.

The Security Council would provide trainingand tools to family office relationship managers, enabling them “assess risk,” Livergood says, and to add this to the services they now provide for families. It would seem to be a good service for all involved, since previously, if families were even aware of these kinds of threats, they pulled together on an ad hoc basis the disparate entities necessary for the extraction of an ill family member trekking in Tibet or to find the best medical facilities and doctors to treat a newly-diagnosed and serious illness. 

The Security Council has identified 10 core areas of threats and is bringing in “best-of-breed resources to identify, alert, prevent and respond if an emergency arises: 

1. Personal
2. Privacy
3. Physical
4. Medical
5. Collections
6. Staffing
7. Sustainability
8. Reputation
9. Enterprise
10. Philanthropy

As with insurance, or any other risk mitigation, everyone would hope never to have to use it—being aware of the threat and preventing it would be job one. But as we see every day, as Livergood puts it, “life happens.” And when it does, having the resources in place to respond immediately can be the difference between a good outcome and an irrevocable one that changes a family forever.