Programming note: Today’s newsletter is short because I was out of the office for much of this week. New subscribers—welcome! Check out the Modus newsletter archive, technology map and allocation index. And reply to this email to say hello, send tips, and share what you want to read more journalism about.
In 2012, Thomas Ming and Jan van Bueren left the Swiss bank they were working at and co-founded FOSS Family Office Advisory, a Zurich-based consulting firm that helped wealthy people establish single-family offices, choose multifamily offices to join, and select the best tax jurisdictions.
FOSS was successful, and it had a website, family-office-advisory.com, where the consultants explained their services, published information on family offices, and shared accolades from industry trade publications. The business also had a LinkedIn page, although it never posted anything.
After nine years, the founders returned to financial institutions. Ming now works at ISP Group, a capital markets boutique, and van Bueren at UBS.
FOSS ceased its activity in 2021, so Ming was puzzled when Modus reached out to him this week about recent updates to its website.
Last month, a new family-office-advisory.com—allegedly an “independent knowledge platform for family offices and UHNW individuals,” according to the website—began sharing its articles, guides and case studies from an affiliated LinkedIn page. But it wasn’t Ming or his former partner behind the new site or doing the posting. Someone else is using the domain name now.
"'FOSS Family Office Advisory’ and family-office-advisory[dot]com were once the same,” Ming told Modus. “Who is now running the website[?] I've no idea.” He plans to remove the URL from the FOSS LinkedIn page since there is no connection between them now.
Who overhauled the website this spring, set up a new LinkedIn page and is sharing content from it is unclear, at least as of this newsletter. There is no contact information on the website, and “Editorial Team” is the byline for all the content.
Modus messaged the LinkedIn page, which was active and posting earlier today, to ask who was running the account and the website but no one has replied. Who owns the domain name could not be learned. An ad run by the LinkedIn page earlier this week might contain a clue: it was paid for by priaid AG, a healthcare technology company in Switzerland.
On its mystery bylines, the new Family Office Advisory website says, “in this category, authorship by committee is the norm, and the value of an article rests on its specificity, sourcing, and judgment rather than on a named author.” Anonymous authorship of serious writing has not been the norm for over a century. (An exception is The Economist, but even its editors acknowledged years ago that publishing without naming authors has drawbacks, and the magazine is transparent about its ownership and leadership.)
Maybe the Family Office Advisory website is still in development and the people behind it will be revealed. Or maybe this will remain another mysterious family-office operation.
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More News
- Only in Modus last week: A Paradox at Goldman Sachs’s Apex Family Office Symposium.
- The 2026 Botoff Consulting Compensation Surveys are underway. Participants' identities remain confidential, and they receive a complimentary copy of the preeminent comp report later this year.
Fill out the SFO survey if you work at a family office, family investment firm, family foundation, or private trust company (the range of positions surveyed was expanded this year). Or the MFO survey, if you work at one of those. - Rockefeller Capital Management, the $212 billion wealth management firm, has partnered with Anthropic to meld AI into its platform.
- High-net-worth investors continue to spread their “mindshare” and assets across a growing number of financial services firms, according to the 30th edition of Capgemini’s World Wealth Report. “Together, these trends underscore mounting pressure on traditional firms to rethink how they engage and retain HNWI clients,” the report says.
- Presage Global, the risk management and security consultancy, partnered with Nines, the estate management software company, to survey 100 family offices about their residential security, operations and risk and published a report. It seems there is a lot of room for improvement: 62% of respondents received no formal annual security training, nearly half never received any training for their role, and only 4% said their training is sufficient.
“The good news is that these security gaps are fixable and may not require larger resource outlays. The families in our data with the lowest incident rates were not the ones with the largest budgets,” Edward Marshall, founder and CEO at Presage Global, wrote in the report. - Bloomberg wrote about French billionaire Pierre Castel’s efforts to control his drink empire after his death.
- The 24-Year-Old AI Wiz Who Counts Jane Street as an Investor.
- The Cattle Empire That Turned Out to Be a Giant Ponzi Scheme.
- Family offices are allocating more capital to infrastructure, especially energy-related projects, and a significant portion of those dollars is going toward nuclear power. For those already invested in nuclear or considering those investments, the Nuclear Scaling Initiative just released an open-source Reactor Selection Tool that anyone can use to evaluate how reactors perform on key scaling criteria using an expert-developed framework.
- A group of scientists and researchers interviewed 11 elite sports coaches about how they make high-pressure decisions and wrote about their findings in Harvard Business Review. They discovered that the coaches don’t all share the same traits; rather, their profession has forced them to develop decision-making formulas that leaders can all borrow.
- You Might Be a Late Bloomer and that’s okay. “Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young. This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.”
David, you've been in the private aircraft brokerage and consulting business for over 20 years. What's the market like right now?
It's very much a seller's market with only about 3.6% of the existing aircraft market up for sale right now (a balanced market is 8%). This means buyers need to be ready and put together their acquisition team before going to market.
What about sellers?
If you're a seller, you can hold the line on pricing and terms—especially with a newer, lower-time aircraft. By going through a series of steps before going to market, you position your asset with strength.
How do you help clients do that?
First, we get to know people and their private aircraft needs so we can give them the best advice. We listen first, then evaluate overall options, and propose a path to success based upon best practices.
And how do people get in touch?
They can visit Integris Aviation Consultancy at www.integrisaviation.com or reach out to me, David Clark, directly by email: david@integrisaviation.com or call or text me anytime: +1 952-261-5945.
Other Stuff
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I'll be in...
- Las Vegas today, at the pool and then out to dinner to celebrate my father-in-law’s birthday and my wedding anniversary (six years already!).
- New York City on Monday, June 15, for a Family Office Rooftop Happy Hour hosted by Ethic, an $8 billion investment firm that specializes in values-aligned SMAs, and Scott Saslow, CEO of ONE WORLD, his single-family office. If you have an SFO or work at one, you can request to attend here.
- Akron in early July.
