02 / Family offices
Counterparty intelligence for principals who answer to one person.
Family offices commission counterparty work for different reasons than institutional shops, and they read the resulting reports differently too. The client is typically the principal, or the CIO acting on the principal's behalf. There is no investment committee in the way, decisions get made privately, and the discretion bar is higher than at any institution we work with. The engagement model is built around that reader.
In practice
What this looks like in practice.
You work with the managing partner directly. There is no project team in the middle, no junior analyst handling collection while a senior partner attends pitch meetings, and no handoff before delivery. The managing partner runs the engagement personally, peer-reviewed by a named outside reviewer where the work calls for it.
Recipients are named on the cover page of the deliverable. The watermark runs through every page of the PDF and identifies who the document was prepared for. The report goes to the people on the list and to no one else. Distribution limits live in the engagement letter rather than in a footer disclaimer.
Beneficial ownership trace is a discrete section of every report we deliver. The trail gets documented layer by layer through whatever jurisdictional opacity is in play, whether that is Wyoming, Delaware, the BVI, Cayman, Jersey, Cyprus, UAE mainland, Mauritius, or Liechtenstein, in whatever combination the actual structure presents. Where the trail goes cold we say so on the page, name the layer it died at, and explain why. The shape of where the opacity is concentrated tends to be a finding in its own right.
Refresh provisions sit inside every report. For longer-running exposures, including long-held positions, family-business stakes, and recurring counterparty relationships, the watch indicator framework turns a single engagement into something closer to a monitoring relationship. The trigger events that would warrant a refresh are named explicitly. Re-engagement comes in at 30% of the original fee.
How we differ
| Typical boutique firm | Red Label | |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement model | Project team | Lead analyst direct, named reviewer |
| Confidentiality | Standard NDA | Named recipients, distribution limits, watermarked deliverables |
| Beneficial ownership | Identified where opaque | Traced layer by layer; cold trails documented |
| Source labeling | Footnoted | Tier 1–4 rubric on every cited source |
| Mitigating factors | Optional | Required, including in High Risk reports |
| Recommendation | Verdict | Conditional, with named escalation triggers |
| Refresh | Quoted on request | 30% of original fee, named triggers |
| Engagement length | Four to six weeks | Ten to fifteen business days |
| Fee | $80,000 to $150,000 | $40,000 flat |
Every engagement
Standard with every engagement.
Every engagement delivers a watermarked PDF with the recipient named on the cover, an executive one-pager scoped for principal distribution, and a cover letter to the named recipients. The package includes a conflict disclosure and a method note, with sanctions screening citing the named databases queried and the dates the queries were run. PEP screening sits in its own labeled section. Beneficial ownership trace is a separate section. The report is signed by the managing partner and countersigned by the outside reviewer.
The firm's Scenario Flagging Algorithm runs against every analyst draft before delivery. The output is a 100,000-sample severity distribution, with the reproducibility seed and run record retained in the engagement file. Counsel for the principal can request the underlying run and inspect the analysis directly. That kind of reproducibility is part of the work we do.
Read a specimen
The work is the better introduction.
The specimen we publish is a 65-page counterparty intelligence report on Roman Abramovich, prepared as a methodology demonstration on a public-record subject. The recommendation against any new engagement is mechanical for a subject already designated under six Western sanctions regimes. The value of the document for a principal evaluating the firm sits in the asset and entity map across those six jurisdictions, in the disclosed analyst-vs-model divergence on the page, and in the way the £2.407B in frozen Chelsea FC sale proceeds is treated as the live constraint rather than the headline.
The document is watermarked as an internal methodology demonstration. Paid engagements are watermarked with the named recipient on every page and shipped with a cover letter naming the distribution list. The discipline on the specimen is what we actually do.
Best fit
Offshore exposures requiring beneficial ownership trace
Founder-aligned operating businesses in jurisdictions with limited public disclosure
Principal-level concentrated positions
Succession-related counterparty work
Pre-philanthropy counterparty screening
Long-term counterparty monitoring with named trigger events
What we do not do
We do not write pitch decks for clients and we do not take reputation work of any kind. Engagements aimed at journalists, critics, or political opponents are not work we take, including under reframings we have already heard. Work that would be used to discredit individuals making lawful disclosures is declined at the conflict-check stage, regardless of how the request gets framed.
None of that is for the website. It is a discipline that has decided which principals we end up doing repeat work for and which never call back. The ones who care about it tend to be the ones the work is for.
Confidential conversation
Office of the Managing Partner
Red Label Intelligence
First conversations are confidential and carry no obligation on either side. Conflict checks complete within two business days. Engagement letters get scoped to the specific decision in front of you rather than to a retainer.
Send a confidential inquiry