Wealth Management
Advising individuals and families rather than institutions, where tax, succession, a concentrated holding and somebody's own nerve are part of the problem rather than noise around it.
Buy-Side: Decides whether to take it. the whole map
The seats
three of them, each answering the same six questions so that they can be read against each other.
Next to it
The other groups on the same side of the price.
Asset Management Private Markets Hedge Funds & Alternatives Insurance & Pensions
What an interview asks here
The one part of the buy-side where tax, succession, a concentrated holding and somebody's own nerve are part of the problem rather than noise around it.
Try each one out loud before you open it. What is underneath is the shape of a complete answer, not a script — somebody who can produce those parts in their own words can also answer the four variations that follow, and somebody who has memorised a paragraph can answer one.
Q1How is advising a household different from running an institutional mandate?
What it is checking. The opening question, and the answer is not 'smaller'.
A complete answer contains:
- An institution has a written objective, a horizon and a governance process; a household has whatever it decided its money is for.
- Both sides of the balance sheet are in scope: property, a business, borrowing against the portfolio.
- Tax, succession and jurisdiction change what is worth holding, not just what it is worth.
- And the client is the one who panics, which is a risk factor an institutional mandate does not have.
Read it properly: Private banking · Behavioural finance
Q2What is the difference between advice and discretion, and why does it matter?
What it is checking. A legal distinction that changes what the seat can and must do.
A complete answer contains:
- Under advice the client decides, so the client has to understand — the recommendation must be explicable and the understanding established.
- Under discretion the manager decides within a mandate and reports afterwards.
- So a discretionary manager can hold something the client would never have chosen and be entirely within the mandate; an adviser cannot.
- Which is why the advisory file — what was recommended, why, and what was explained — is the substance rather than the paperwork.
Read it properly: Investment advisory · Investor protection
Q3A client has most of their wealth in the company they founded. How do you frame it?
What it is checking. The most common situation in this seat, and it is not solved by saying 'diversify'.
A complete answer contains:
- Name it as a decision: holding is a choice made again every day, not a neutral default.
- Separate the questions — what the household needs to be safe, and what it is willing to leave concentrated.
- Then the mechanisms, each with a cost: selling in stages, borrowing against it, or hedging where the instrument exists.
- And the constraints that decide which are available: tax, lock-ups, insider rules and the client's own role in the company.
Read it properly: How much in one thing · Family offices
Q4Why is lending against a portfolio riskier than it looks?
What it is checking. The correlation between the collateral and the reason for the call.
A complete answer contains:
- The loan is fixed and the collateral moves, so the loan-to-value rises exactly when markets fall.
- The call then arrives at the worst moment and is met by selling into the fall.
- So the sale is forced rather than chosen, which converts a paper loss into a realised one.
- The mitigation is headroom sized for a real drawdown, not for an average one.
Read it properly: Margin and collateral · What a margin call is
Q5Risk tolerance and risk capacity — what is the difference?
What it is checking. Two things a suitability questionnaire often merges into one score.
A complete answer contains:
- Tolerance is what somebody can bear to watch: a preference, and an unreliable one measured in a calm market.
- Capacity is what their circumstances can absorb: time horizon, other income, commitments.
- They frequently point opposite ways — somebody nervous with decades ahead, or somebody relaxed who needs the money in two years.
- The file has to record both and say which constrained the outcome.
Read it properly: Investment advisory · Sizing a position
Q6What should a family office do first?
What it is checking. Whether you know that governance precedes investing here.
A complete answer contains:
- Write down what the money is for and who decides what — an investment policy anybody can act on.
- Without it every decision is re-argued from first principles at the worst moment, and the office becomes whoever spoke last.
- Then consolidated reporting, which sounds trivial and is the hardest operational task in the office.
- Only then allocation, because the allocation is an answer to a question the first two steps ask.
Read it properly: Family offices · Building an allocation
Q7Why do total costs matter more here than almost anywhere?
What it is checking. Long horizons and layered structures, compounding in the wrong direction.
A complete answer contains:
- The horizon is a lifetime or longer, so a small annual difference compounds into a large one.
- The structures are layered — a wrapper, a fund of funds, an underlying manager — and each layer charges.
- Much of it is not on a statement: spreads, custody, currency conversion, product margin inside a structure.
- Which is why the honest number is total cost in money, stated for the whole arrangement rather than per component.
Read it properly: Costs and fees · What the wrapper changes
Do these against a clock — one at a time, ninety seconds each, answer before you look.
Whose questions these are. Every question on this page was written for this publication. None is taken from anybody else’s question bank, and none is a claim about what any named firm asks — that is neither verifiable from here nor ours to assert. They are our own reading of which mechanism a question of this kind is testing. Information and education only.
Test yourself: five questions
Five quick questions on this part of the industry — checked entirely on your device, nothing stored or sent. Wrong answers come with explanations, and the seat pages above hold every answer. For education only.