Landmark Family Office (LFO), a private multi-family office, announced on Monday the establishment of its global headquarters in Hong Kong as the city’s authorities aim to attract at least 200 family offices by 2025 with a series of incentives.
LFO’s move to pick Hong Kong as its global headquarters comes as the local government is targeting to transform the city into a global family office hub.
The Hong Kong government in March introduced a series of measures including a revamped investment migration scheme, new tax concessions, and other incentives to lure family offices to set up offices in the city. The tax concession scheme, which benefits qualified transactions of family-owned investment holding vehicles managed by single-family offices in Hong Kong, has already come into effect on May 19.
These family office-oriented measures are parts of the Chinese special administrative region (SAR)’s efforts to restore business confidence and investor allure after a flight of capital and investors to rival financial hubs like Singapore due to strict COVID-19 rules and increased geopolitical uncertainties in the last few years.
The number of single-family offices in Singapore has reached 1,100 as of end-2022, up 57.1% from 700 one year earlier, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) revealed in its annual report published on July 5.
Incorporated in Hong Kong in 2022 to serve the founding families and independent clients, LFO is led by chief investment officer Andrew Sharrock, an ex-APAC CIO at US custodian bank State Street, and chief executive officer Cameron Harvey, who previously held senior management roles at firms including UBS and BNP Paribas across the Asia-Pacific region.
The nascent multi-family office commenced operations in January this year and has already built offices in Hong Kong and Sydney. The firm targets to expand its presence to Singapore and the Middle East in the near future, it said in a statement.
Through the Hong Kong headquarters, LFO is looking to leverage the strategic location to provide a suite of tailored family office solutions centered around investment management across traditional and alternative asset classes.
LFO’s decision to anchor the business in Hong Kong comes from the founding members’ confidence in the city’s “regulatory environment” and “strong government support for the family office sector,” said Harvey in the statement.
These favourable factors provide “an optimal ecosystem for our family office setup,” said Harvey. “The family office industry in Hong Kong is developing at a rapid pace, with increasing demand for bespoke sophisticated wealth management solutions for ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families and individuals.”
With a team experienced in areas including asset management, private equity (PE), legacy planning, and family governance, LFO operates under a private multi-family office model that differs significantly from the typical external asset manager (EAM) models that are prevalent in the market.
It places a primary focus on investments and asset management to build out a personalised approach for every client, versus the current mainstream approach of relying on recruitment of relationship managers, and by proxy their clients, from private banks.