Some families do not fit a single country. A business in one place, a home in another, children studying somewhere else again, and a portfolio assembled across three decades and several jurisdictions. This page is about the structures that hold that together — discretionary management, international life assurance bonds, corporate investment accounts and trusts — and, more importantly, the order in which to think about them.
Discretionary asset management
Most people arrive with a collection rather than a portfolio: a fund bought on a recommendation, shares from a former employer, a legacy product nobody has reviewed in years, and cash sitting somewhere earning very little. Individually each decision made sense. Together they rarely add up to a strategy.
A discretionary mandate replaces that with a single managed portfolio built around your objectives, your time horizon and the currency you actually spend in.
- Managed to a mandate, not a model: risk profile, income requirements and constraints agreed in advance, then implemented consistently rather than reactively.
- Institutional access: through deVere’s scale, portfolios can use managers and share classes normally reserved for far larger mandates.
- Multi-currency by design: holding assets in the currency of your future liabilities removes a risk most cross-border investors carry without realising it.
- Genuine oversight: consolidated reporting across holdings, so performance and cost are visible in one place rather than spread across four statements.
International life assurance bonds
For internationally mobile families, the wrapper an investment sits inside often matters more than the investment itself. An international life assurance bond — issued from a jurisdiction such as Luxembourg, Dublin or the Isle of Man — is a structure recognised across most European tax systems.
- Portability: the structure is designed to travel. If you move from Spain to Portugal, or back to the UK, the bond can usually be adapted rather than liquidated and rebuilt.
- Gross roll-up: the underlying assets generally grow without annual taxation inside the bond, with tax arising on withdrawal under the rules of your country of residence.
- Open architecture: funds, ETFs, discretionary mandates and in larger cases unlisted assets can sit within one policy.
- Succession: beneficiaries can be named directly, which typically allows proceeds to pass outside a multi-jurisdictional probate process.
- Segregation: in Luxembourg, assets are held separately from the insurer’s balance sheet under the Triangle of Security, with policyholders ranking ahead of other creditors.
The efficiency of a bond depends entirely on where you are resident and how long you intend to stay. It is a genuinely powerful structure in the right situation and an unnecessary cost in the wrong one, which is why it should follow the residency analysis rather than lead it.
Company and corporate investment accounts
Business owners frequently accumulate surplus cash inside a company because the alternative — extracting it and paying personal tax — feels worse. It then sits on deposit, losing purchasing power quietly for years.
- Corporate investment accounts: allow retained profits to be invested rather than held in cash, within a structure appropriate to the company’s jurisdiction.
- Extraction planning: the question of how and when profits leave the company is usually worth more than the investment return itself, particularly if you are considering relocating.
- Exit preparation: if a sale is on the horizon, the structure of the balance sheet in the years beforehand affects the outcome materially.
- Cross-border ownership: where the company sits in one country and the owner in another, substance and treaty position need to be considered together.
Trusts and asset protection
Trusts are frequently either over-sold or dismissed entirely. The reality is narrower: they solve specific problems well, and are an expensive answer to problems they were never designed for.
- Clear ownership across borders: where family members and assets sit in different countries, a trust can establish unambiguously who owns what.
- Succession without probate: assets held in trust generally pass under the trust deed rather than through a court process in each jurisdiction.
- Protection and control: for families with younger beneficiaries, or where circumstances argue for staged rather than immediate distribution.
- Full transparency: modern structures are reportable under the Common Reporting Standard. A trust is a planning tool, not a hiding place, and any adviser presenting it otherwise should be avoided.
Whether a trust makes sense depends heavily on your country of residence. Some jurisdictions recognise them straightforwardly, others do not recognise them at all and tax the underlying assets as if the trust did not exist. That question needs answering before anything is established.
How these fit together
These are not four separate products to be bought individually. In most cases the sensible order runs: establish where you are and will be tax resident, decide what structure the assets should sit in, then decide how they are managed inside it.
Reversing that order — choosing investments first and considering structure afterwards — is the single most common and most expensive mistake I see in cross-border portfolios.
Where to start
Almost always with residency. Where you are tax resident, and where you intend to be in five years, determines which of these structures helps and which simply adds cost. Everything else follows from that answer.