← Overview2. Setup & Registration →
There is no single correct vehicle for a family office. The right one depends on how much weight the family places on control, succession, and tax, in that order or another, and most real structures end up combining more than one.
← Overview2. Setup & Registration →
← Overview2. Setup & Registration →
The four building blocks
Private Trust
Governed by the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. The natural choice when succession is the primary goal: assets and their eventual distribution are defined in the trust deed itself, largely outside the uncertainty of a will being contested. Weaker for a family that wants to actively trade or reinvest capital through the structure day to day.
LLP or Private Company
The natural choice when control and active investment matter most: a board or designated partners actively manage capital, enter into agreements, and hold operating or investment assets directly. Succession has to be engineered on top, through the constitutional documents and nomination structuring, rather than being native to the form.
Section 8 Company
The vehicle for the family's philanthropy, when giving is structured rather than ad hoc. Requires downstream registration (12AB and 80G, covered on the next page) to give donors tax benefit and the entity tax-exempt status on its charitable income.
A hybrid
Most family offices we've built aren't a single vehicle: an LLP or company for the investment and operating side, a trust for succession, and a Section 8 entity for philanthropy, each doing the one job it's actually good at.
What we help you decide
Which combination fits depends on questions only the family can answer: how much of the wealth is meant to be actively managed versus preserved and passed on, whether philanthropy is a real, ongoing commitment or occasional, and how many jurisdictions the family itself lives across. We score the options on control, succession, and tax together, not as three separate conversations, across India, the GCC, and the US.
Talk to us about your family office.
Scoring the options against what the family actually needs
- Private Trust: Succession: strong, built into the deed itself. Control: limited, once assets are settled into the trust. Tax: taxed at the maximum marginal rate on most structures, unless it qualifies as a specific-beneficiary trust taxed at the beneficiaries' own slab rates.
- LLP or Private Company: Control: strong, a board or designated partners actively manage capital. Succession: has to be engineered through nomination and constitutional documents, not native to the form. Tax: entity-level tax on income, plus tax on distributions to partners or shareholders.
- Section 8 Company: purpose-built for philanthropy, not scored on control or succession the same way; tax-exempt on charitable income once 12AB and 80G registrations are in place.
- Hybrid (most families we build for): an LLP or company for active capital, a trust for succession, and a Section 8 entity for philanthropy, each carrying the job it's actually suited to rather than one vehicle trying to do all three.
See how one family combined a holding company and a trust ahead of a liquidity event, in our case study.
Common questions
Can a structure be changed later, once it's set up?
Assets can generally be moved between entities later, but every such transfer is itself a transaction (with its own stamp duty, tax, and, for a trust, irrevocability considerations) which is why getting the structure right at the outset is materially cheaper than restructuring it after the fact.
Choosing the structure and vehicle.
LLP, trust, company, or hybrid: scored across India, the GCC, and the US.
Read the briefing →
Talk to us about your family office.
Bring the situation, however incomplete; leave with a written, fixed-fee plan for the structure, on the same calendar as everything else we file for you.