Strategy
Critical Empathy: Structuring Advice for Women

At a time where there are calls for more focus on the needs of women in the wealth management industry, this article tackles the issue from a particular perspective: a need for empathy.
Katherine Ellis, Group Business Development Director at Boston
Multi Family Office, explains why empathetic understanding
plays such an important role in devising successful wealth
structuring solutions for ultra-high net worth women.
Watchers of the industry will know that improving wealth
management provision for women is one of its hottest topics at
present. This piece forms part of our forthcoming research report
Winning Women: Key Insights for Wealth Managers Targeting
Today’s Dynamic Female Clients, which will be available to
download from 6 December.
Wealth structuring is the process of properly using companies,
trusts, foundations, and other arrangements to control assets in
the best interests of their owners or beneficiaries. It is about
helping wealth creators control liability, manage incomings and
outgoings, and plan for succession. It is a process and service
driven by individual desires about family, ambition, and our
place in the world: it is deeply personal. Yet if providers in
this space know that every solution needs to be built from the
ground up for each individual, why is it that so many firms seem
well-equipped to do it for one gender but not the other?
The answer is empathy
On the whole, men will be more comfortable dictating their wishes
to advisors on a transactional basis, whereas women will place a
greater value on being genuinely understood. Too many businesses,
including those which provide structuring, are built with a
minimal focus on empathy, and this goes a long way towards
explaining the failure of many institutions to deliver a good
service to UHNW women. To abuse a stereotyped statement, “it’s
not the advice they give, it’s the way they give it.”
Building (or choosing) a family office with
empathy
Empathy is unpopular because it’s expensive: it takes more time
when dealing with clients, and more time spent internally
building the right culture and environment in which employees can
practise it. Businesses that do invest this time will have
certain markers, though, and these will be of interest to UHNW
women looking to either select a provider or build their own
family office.
Empathy is hard to scale, so it is most likely to be found in
small, private firms. So-called “supermarket” wealth managers
with dozens of offices and hundreds of staff are more likely to
be transactional. Empathetic organisations will naturally have
more women in senior roles, as these environments are more
conducive to the advancement of women. They are not,
counter-intuitively, likely to feature board quotas or other
“forced” diversity measures. They may well be family owned, and
they will be progressive in their provision of things like
flexible working conditions.
Finally, they are unlikely to be the cheapest option on the
market and they are more likely to take their time getting to
understand clients before they put together quotes. Prospective
clients should recognise these as positive signs, rather than
delays or inflated costs: the empathetic business and the
transactional business are selling fundamentally different
services.
A case study: empathy in action
Because Boston started as a single family office and remains
privately owned, we’ve been able to focus on empathy as a
differentiator. There have been many cases, over the years, in
which this had directly benefited our female clients.
One of our clients built a successful, international business
from the ground up. She had great experience of dealing with
large corporations and closing sizable deals. As a result, she
was straight-talking and placed a lot of emphasis on building
very transparent “no nonsense” relationships with third parties
to ensure the job was done properly. We started working with this
client as she was moving from wealth creation to wealth
preservation mode, with a particular eye on succession. Several
providers had identified that she should settle a “vanilla”
discretionary trust, which would pass on her wealth to her three
children in a tax-efficient and easily-administered fashion. We
ultimately gave her the same solution, but the difference was in
how we went about it.
Through extended discussions with both the client and her family,
we came to understand that although she wanted her wealth to pass
to her children, she was also very concerned that they were
unprepared to handle it. This is not an uncommon concern in
general, but the details always differ in subtle but important
ways. Instead of rushing into the creation of the trust, we spent
a significant amount of time drawing up a document that showed
our understanding of her wishes and concerns, as well as a
framework for the education and mentoring of the next generation.
As a single mother, the client also took comfort from having
professional female trustees with children of their own.
What she was offered by other providers was a transaction; what
she ended up buying from Boston was empathy.