ABOUT
We built this for you.
The knowledge captured here was earned over time through real experience with real families — their challenges, their questions, their ultimate successes.
Our Story
Forty-five years of experience.
Always on your side of the table.
Select a year
1980
First port of callIt all started in the summer of 1980, in the private bank of one of the continent's most prominent multigenerational business and investing families. That was Mark Haynes Daniell's first professional engagement with a family business.
The next four decades took him through twenty years as a partner at Bain & Company, in the US, UK, Switzerland, Moscow and Singapore, three years as an investment bank director, and a stint as president of a publicly listed investment firm in Singapore. In addition, he can draw from experience as a main board director of both public and private companies around the world.
Throughout these years, family business ownership, leadership and strategy were a central focus of his assignments. Among them, a few have publicly mentioned his involvement as an advisor — including strategic advisory engagements with Gucci (IPO), LGT, Guinness/Diageo, Del Monte and DHL, along with main board positions at Olam International and ED&F Man Commodities (founded in 1783). However, the vast majority of his work over these years remains, as it almost always is, fully confidential.
In addition, Mark was an active member in the Singapore Government's Economic Review Committee on financial services, creating and chairing the private wealth management initiative which contributed to the accelerated development of the nation's capabilities and successes in this area.
2000
A boutique is foundedWhile continuing his advisory work and main board responsibilities, Mark also began to author a number of books dedicated to different aspects of private wealth, family business and global policy matters. This began with World of Risk: Next Generation Strategies for a Volatile Era, which won many awards, was a Sunday Times of London Business Book of the Week, and has now come out in five different languages.
By 2010, Mark was ready to found the Raffles Family Wealth Trust Pte Ltd., a boutique advisory firm dedicated entirely to legacy families and their greater enterprises — defined as their businesses, philanthropies, family offices and other assets and activities. Privately owned and independent.
No asset management products to sell or other conflicts of interest. Just pure objective advice on the family's side of the table.
The firm has since been recognised by:
2018
Singapore's Leading Boutique Family Advisory Firm
Wealth & Finance International — Global Business Excellence Awards
Spear's 500
Top Recommended Family Office Services
For distinguished international UHNW families
2017 — 2023
Top Recommended Family Wealth Manager & Family Office Advisor
Spear's 500 — listed seven years running
2015
The framework takes shapeFive years later, Mark continued his hands-on advisory work, but also realized that the knowledge and experience he had accumulated from working with some of the world's wealthiest families and their businesses could provide the foundation for an online learning platform which could be accessed by other families.
The idea was to bring the wisdom from successfully wealthy families with multigenerational legacies to other families — from the newly rich to more established families of varying degrees of wealth and sophistication around the world.
These exemplary families were the ones who treated legacy as a continuous, evolving journey — and who had the ability to see clearly the nature of the challenges they faced, and the courage and foresight to put in place both proven and new approaches that evolved over time.
What Mark first built as a private framework for a London-based family in 2006 had become, by 2015, the foundation for everything he — and now we — do: the whole of Integrated Legacy Strategy™, and focused efforts on one or more individual priorities. One coherent approach. Ten interconnected elements. Built from real-world practice — not just theory or derived learning.
Around this core approach developed a senior team — all practitioners representing different areas of expertise, many of whom come from legacy families themselves — drawn from London, Singapore, the US, and Europe. Each a globally recognized authority in his or her own field.
Today
The voyage continuesWe continue to work, learn and expand our capabilities across the world today — developing new and creative approaches to legacy family, wealth and business strategy in these changing times. This includes structured education, individual and family advisory mandates, and serving the collective needs of a unique community of like-minded family leaders and the members of the next generation as they face an ever-evolving set of challenges from within and surrounding the family.
And we will keep growing — new ideas, new locations, new families, new generations joining the journey.
Yet our methodology, books and other publications, our team and now this platform are all created around a single dedication that hasn't changed in forty-five years:
"We measure our success by our clients' results."
Our Framework
The ten elements every legacy family must address.
Mark Haynes Daniell pioneered the Integrated Legacy Strategy™ framework in 2006, initially developed for a major international family based in London. It has been the working diagnostic he has applied successfully with many families ever since.
Click an element on the wheel to explore what it covers.
Element 02
Governance & Leadership
The formal structures and disciplines that determine how your family makes decisions, transitions leadership, and ensures continuity across generations. A coherent governance model — covering identity, leadership, succession, roles and responsibilities, and the documents that formalise them — is what allows a family to act as one rather than as many.
Element 03
Asset Structuring & Estate Planning
How your family’s assets are held and structured over time — including the philosophy of wealth, the legal and fiscal architecture for protecting it across jurisdictions and generations, and the principles that govern its distribution.
Element 04
Wealth Management
How your family’s wealth is invested, overseen and preserved — clear disciplines for investment and withdrawal, a fully professional approach across every portfolio, and the long-term focus on value preservation that keeps capital working for generations to come.
Element 05
Business Ownership, Leadership & Strategy
When the family owns operating businesses, ownership, governance and strategy must be addressed together — not as three separate problems.
Element 06
Philanthropy & Social Engagement
Sharing wealth in a way that gives it meaning and unites the family. Approached intentionally, philanthropy becomes a way of strengthening family identity and engaging the next generation around a shared sense of purpose.
Element 07
Family Office & Ecosystem
No legacy family operates in isolation. The family office and the wider ecosystem of advisors — lawyers, bankers, accountants, investment managers — are the operating layer of your strategy.
Element 08
Family Dynamics & Communication
The culture, relationships and individual realities that shape every other element. The 'soft' issues — unity, shared purpose, trust, roles, responsibilities, and the absence of unaddressed conflict — are very often the hardest.
Element 09
NextGen Education & Succession Planning
A structured, intentional approach to preparing the rising generation for what they will one day inherit — both emotionally and practically. Assessing where the next generation stands today, identifying the capabilities they will need, and building a comprehensive education program around them is the difference between heirs who are ready to lead and heirs who are not.
Element 10
Integration, Risk & Action
The synthesis itself. The first nine elements are powerful individually, but a family's true power emerges only when they work as one — held together by a complete and shared vision, family buy-in, the right resources, and clear measures of success. Integration also means a consolidated approach to identifying, prioritizing and acting on the risks that can erode or destroy a legacy — tax changes, regulatory shifts, marital and family disputes, cyber and physical security, reputational exposure, market shocks.
Element 01
Your Family: Past, Present & Future
The foundation of any legacy plan: a clear understanding of who your family is, where it came from, what it faces today, and what it aspires to create. Each family emerges from a unique history and culture; documenting that history, defining the family, and articulating purpose, vision and values gives every later decision a center to return to.
OUR TEAM
Here to serve you.
Professional practitioners and family advisors with decades of direct experience around the world in areas essential to the development and implementation of successful multigenerational family wealth and legacy strategies.
practitioners
represented
experience
legacy families
Our Publications
Acknowledged global thought leadership drawn from real-world experience.
15 current and pending books in five languages, plus contributed chapters to two other books and numerous articles.
Many of these titles are also now available in The Raffles Family Wealth and Legacy Book Series, produced by World Scientific Publishing, a leading independent global publishing house based in Singapore.
Publication
THREE THINGS WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW
Sustaining a meaningful family legacy requires more than just a focus on financial wealth.
True family wealth is built upon a solid foundation of shared purpose, vision and values, healthy relationships and careful succession planning across generations.
Legacy strategy is always dynamic, constantly evolving
and is both multi-dimensional and multi-generational.
The individual pieces need to be developed and aligned in a coherent fashion to serve the long-term needs of the strategy and support the realization of the family's greatest aspirations — creating a whole which is worth far more than the sum of its individual parts.
Preserving private wealth is a public good.
Loss of wealth is not only a loss for the family. It is a loss for the people involved in the family's greater enterprise which includes its investments, businesses, philanthropic activity and other engagements with the communities in which legacy families live, work and contribute.
"It is indeed possible to beat the proverbial curse of riches to rags in three generations."
Mark Haynes Daniell
Strategy for the Wealthy Family
However you'd like to begin — we're here for you.
See where your family stands across the ten elements of the Integrated Legacy Strategy™ framework, and leave with your initial priorities. It’s private and takes just a few minutes.
Learn the frameworks, tools and practices behind lasting family legacies, and use them to build your own.
Work with Mark and our team on a single element or your whole legacy plan. Or choose a Customized Family Learning Program, offered to four families each year.