(by Harry Yu 余亮恒)
Winning the Wealth Race
Over the last few days, many people in Hong Kong’s wealth management and family office circles have been celebrating the news that Hong Kong has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth booking centre.
It is certainly an important milestone.
For decades, Switzerland occupied a unique place in the private wealth world. For many practitioners, Switzerland was not simply another jurisdiction. It represented a benchmark. In that context, Hong Kong moving into the number one position is a significant achievement and one that should not be understated.
(Source: BCG Global Wealth Report)
Yet as I read the headlines, I found myself less interested in whether Hong Kong had become number one, and more interested in what happens next.
This edition also happens to mark the first anniversary of HK Structuring Insights. Looking back over the past twelve months, the articles have covered topics ranging from CRS developments and family trust disputes to corporate re-domiciliation, governance challenges and evolving family office structures. On the surface, these may appear to be separate subjects. Increasingly, I have come to view them as different manifestations of the same underlying trend.
Chinese private wealth is becoming more international.
That may sound obvious today, but the implications are deeper than many people realise. For a growing number of entrepreneurial families, wealth is no longer concentrated in one business, one city or even one jurisdiction. Family members live in different countries, businesses operate across borders, assets are held through multiple structures and advisors sit in different time zones. What once felt relatively straightforward can become surprisingly complex within a single generation.
Over the years, I have noticed that wealth often globalises faster than the systems designed to support it. Businesses expand internationally, investment portfolios become more diversified, holding structures multiply, trusts are established and family members relocate. Yet the governance arrangements, decision-making processes and underlying assumptions frequently remain rooted in an earlier stage of the family’s development.
For a period of time, this may work perfectly well, until complexity eventually arrives through succession, regulation, family dynamics or simply the passage of time.
Many of the issues that advisors encounter in practice are not really trust problems, tax problems or banking problems in isolation. More often, they are symptoms of a wider system struggling to keep pace with the reality it now needs to support.
This is one reason why I find the recent discussion around Hong Kong’s success so interesting.
The BCG report focuses on booked wealth. That is understandable because assets under management, rankings and capital flows are all measurable. The harder question is whether Hong Kong can evolve from being a highly successful booking centre into something more.
Historically, one of Hong Kong’s greatest strengths has been its role as a connector. It connected Chinese entrepreneurs to international capital markets, global investors to opportunities in China, and private wealth to international banking and investment platforms. In many respects, Hong Kong became one of the world’s most effective financial intermediaries.
As Chinese wealth matures and transitions into second and third generations, however, the challenge increasingly shifts from wealth creation to wealth preservation, governance and continuity. Families begin asking different questions. Ownership becomes more complicated. Control becomes more sensitive. Jurisdictional considerations become more relevant. The quality of advice, governance and institutional support begins to matter in ways that are not always visible during the wealth creation phase.
In that sense, attracting wealth and helping families sustain wealth may be related, but they are not identical disciplines. The same may also be true for wealth centres.
Winning the wealth race is a remarkable achievement. The harder challenge may be building the foundations that allow wealth, families and institutions to remain resilient long after the race itself has been won.
Why Structures Are Not the Difficult Part
While preparing for the CUHK executive programme a few weeks ago, I found myself revisiting a question that has appeared repeatedly throughout my career.
What exactly are we talking about when we talk about cross-border structuring?
At first glance, the answer seems straightforward. Most people immediately think about trusts, holding companies, family offices, tax residency arrangements or perhaps a particular jurisdiction. These are certainly the topics that dominate client conversations, and they are usually the first things advisors draw on whiteboards and PowerPoint slides.
Yet after enough years working with entrepreneurial families, I have gradually become less convinced that structures themselves are where the real complexity sits.
One reason is that structures usually do what they are designed to do. Trusts separate ownership from control, holding companies consolidate assets, family offices coordinate investments and passports improve mobility. None of these outcomes are particularly mysterious.
What has always fascinated me more is what happens after the structure is established.
Founders continue behaving as if nothing has changed, family members interpret arrangements differently, children grow up in different countries, businesses evolve in directions nobody originally anticipated and relationships that once felt stable become more complicated. The structure itself may remain exactly the same, yet the environment surrounding it gradually changes.
Looking back, many of the situations that stayed with me over the years were not situations where a structure failed. More often, they were situations where the structure continued to function exactly as drafted while the family system around it evolved in ways that nobody had fully anticipated.
This was something I found myself discussing repeatedly during the cross border structuring programme I was teaching at CUHK Executive Education.
CUHK Executive Education – Cross-Border Structuring Programme (May 2026)
The participants came from very different backgrounds. Some were from wealth management, some from legal and tax backgrounds, some from family offices and some were entrepreneurs themselves. Yet an interesting pattern emerged. Discussions that began with trusts often evolved into governance discussions, tax questions became family discussions, and family office conversations frequently turned into questions of authority, expectations and future decision-making.
By the end of the programme, I realised I had spent surprisingly little time discussing structures in isolation. Most of the interesting conversations were really about the interaction between structures and the systems surrounding them.
That observation was not new. The classroom simply made it more obvious.
Over the years I had found myself drawing variations of the same picture for clients, families and advisors. The details changed, but the underlying idea remained remarkably consistent. Whenever people focused exclusively on one structure, they often lost sight of the wider system that gave the structure its meaning.
Eventually those sketches evolved into something that I now use as a teaching and discussion tool.
Cross-border structuring is rarely one tool. More often, it is a family system.
Over time, I began referring to it as the Cross-Border Family Systems Model™.
The framework emerged largely from practical necessity. I simply needed a way of explaining why discussions that began with trusts, family offices or tax residency arrangements almost always ended up somewhere much broader.
Most structures sit within a wider system. That system includes ownership arrangements, governance arrangements, operating businesses, investment platforms, regulatory environments and, perhaps most importantly, family behaviour. Each layer influences the others. Looking at any one layer in isolation can sometimes produce a technically correct answer while still missing the larger picture.
That may sound obvious, yet many recent developments seem to be moving in exactly this direction.
Banks increasingly ask questions that go beyond documentation. CRS has normalised transparency. Fiduciary expectations continue to rise. Even recent outbound investment developments in China appear to be looking beyond simple capital flows and towards broader questions of ownership, control, data, people and economic interests.
The common theme is not necessarily more regulation. It is that the world increasingly views cross-border activity as a connected system rather than a collection of individual transactions.
Perhaps advisors need to do the same.
What Makes a Mature Wealth Hub?
The next phase may require a somewhat different set of capabilities.
Over the past decade, I have increasingly noticed that many entrepreneurial families are no longer asking the same questions they asked ten or twenty years ago.
The earlier conversations were often about expansion, access and opportunity. How should overseas assets be held? Which jurisdiction is most suitable? Which bank, investment platform or structure should be used?
Today, a growing number of discussions start from a different place.
Families are thinking about succession. They are thinking about how future decisions will be made when the founder is no longer at the centre of every discussion. They are thinking about children who may live in different countries, businesses that operate across multiple jurisdictions and assets that have become increasingly diversified over time.
In other words, the conversation gradually shifts from wealth creation to wealth continuity.
Once that happens, the quality of the ecosystem surrounding wealth becomes increasingly important.
When families decide where to establish structures, where to anchor governance arrangements or where to build family offices, they are not simply choosing a jurisdiction. They are also choosing a legal system, a regulatory environment, a professional community and, ultimately, a level of trust.
That trust is rarely created by a single law, a single institution or a single professional.
It develops gradually through accumulated experience. Families observe whether structures operate as expected, whether fiduciary responsibilities are taken seriously, whether professional advice remains client-focused and whether important decisions can be made within a stable and predictable environment. Over time, these experiences collectively shape confidence in a jurisdiction.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the future competitiveness of wealth centres may look quite different from the past.
For much of the past century, successful financial centres were often judged by the amount of capital they attracted. Assets under management, capital inflows and market rankings remain important, and Hong Kong’s recent achievement should certainly be recognised in that context.
Recent developments in China point in the same direction. The discussion surrounding State Council Order No. 837 has generated considerable attention among entrepreneurs and advisors, but what struck me most was not any individual provision. Rather, it was the broader signal. Questions of ownership, control, beneficial interests, reporting, data and cross-border activity are increasingly being viewed through a wider and more integrated lens. Whether one is looking at CRS, banking due diligence or the latest outbound investment framework, the underlying direction appears remarkably consistent: transparency is increasing, and the focus is gradually shifting from structures themselves to the realities sitting behind those structures.
Yet as Chinese wealth becomes increasingly international and increasingly multigenerational, I suspect another set of measures will gradually become more relevant.
Families are not simply deciding where to book assets. They are deciding where to establish structures, where to anchor governance arrangements, where to build family offices and where to make some of the most important decisions affecting future generations.
In that environment, trust becomes increasingly important. Not trust in the narrow legal sense, but trust in institutions, professional standards, regulatory consistency and the broader ecosystem surrounding wealth.
Perhaps this is where Hong Kong’s next challenge lies.
The city has already demonstrated that it can attract wealth. The harder task may be helping families organise, govern and sustain that wealth over time. That requires more than investment opportunities or access to capital markets. It requires a professional community capable of helping families navigate increasingly complex questions around ownership, governance, succession and continuity.
Looking back over the past year of writing HK Structuring Insights, I find myself spending less time discussing structures and more time discussing the systems surrounding those structures.
The trust still matters. The family office still matters. The holding company still matters. Yet many of the most important conversations eventually circle back to governance, decision-making and how families adapt to a world that is becoming simultaneously more international and more transparent.
Perhaps that is why so many of the discussions in the CUHK classroom eventually drifted away from structures and towards systems.
Structures remain important. They are often where conversations begin.
The more difficult challenge, whether for families or for wealth centres, is building the foundations that allow those structures to remain relevant long after they have been created.
If Hong Kong succeeds in doing that, the recent BCG ranking may eventually be remembered as more than a milestone.
It may be remembered as the point at which Hong Kong began evolving from a successful booking centre into a mature wealth hub.
That, at least, strikes me as a much more interesting challenge than the ranking itself.
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