The Rich are Terrible at Dying Well

The DBS Asian Family Office Almanac 2026 has confirmed what anyone in this industry already knew: the ultra-wealthy are world-class at building fortunes and categorically incompetent at passing them on.  The solutions are not complicated.  The problem is entirely one of will — which is ironic, given that a will is the one document most of them have neglected to execute properly.

The Size of the Problem

Before addressing what family offices are failing to do, it is worth establishing the scale of what is at stake.  Cerulli Associates projects that US$124 trillion will change hands globally through 2048 — the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in recorded history.  Baby boomers and their predecessors account for US$100 trillion of that total, or 81 per cent.  Households with more than US$1 million in investable assets — 2 per cent of all households — account for US$62 trillion alone, more than half the entire transfer.

In Asia-Pacific, McKinsey estimates US$5.8 trillion in intergenerational wealth transfer between 2023 and 2030.  The ultra-high-net-worth segment drives most of that figure.  Asia-Pacific personal financial assets are on track to reach US$120 trillion by 2030 — 40 per cent of the global total — growing at a 6.4 per cent compound annual growth rate, with the HNW segment expanding at more than 8 per cent.

Asia’s life insurance market for high-net-worth clients is projected to generate annual new-business premiums of US$100 billion to US$140 billion by 2030.  And yet McKinsey also finds that only 15 to 20 per cent of high-net-worth individuals in Asia have integrated life insurance into their wealth planning.  The gap between the transfer that is coming and the preparation that exists is not a small one.  It is a chasm.

The DBS Almanac: A Portrait of Dysfunction

DBS Private Bank released its Asian Family Office Almanac 2026 on 30 October 2026.  The survey covered more than 200 family offices across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.  The findings are an indictment dressed up in polite language.  Seventy-nine per cent of ultra-high-net-worth families want to pass wealth to two or more generations.  Forty-three per cent have not yet involved the next generation in planning.  Thirty-three per cent cite the patriarch’s or matriarch’s wish to remain in charge as the reason for the delay.  Fifty-four per cent hold family assets in their own name.  Twenty-three per cent have left key-person risk unaddressed.  Twenty-three per cent have no plan for family conflict.  Eighty-five per cent have no formal business continuity plan, rely on informal arrangements, or are unsure whether one even exists.

Eight in ten families want a multi-generational legacy.  Nearly half have not spoken to their children about it.  Eighty-five per cent cannot tell you what happens to the business if the founder dies on Tuesday.  These statistics describe not a wealth management crisis but a psychological one: the founding generation has conflated its own continued existence with the continued existence of the enterprise.  These are not the same thing.

The Historical Record

The popular belief that wealth naturally perpetuates itself across generations is not supported by evidence.  The Williams Group, a US wealth consultancy, studied more than 3,000 families over a 20-year period and found that 70 per cent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and 90 per cent by the third.  The causes were not primarily investment returns.  They were failure to communicate, failure to prepare heirs, and breakdown of trust within the family.

The anecdotal record is more colourful.  Nina Wang Kung Yu-Sum, once Asia’s richest woman, died in 2007.  Her estate — built on the real estate empire of Chinachem Group — became the subject of one of Hong Kong’s most protracted legal battles in decades.  Her husband Teddy Wang Teh-Huei had disappeared at sea in 1990.  A forged-will dispute consumed years and multiple court proceedings before a final ruling in 2011.  The assets existed.  The plan did not.

In Singapore, the Lee Kum Kee family resolved its second-generation transition through a governance restructuring that took years of internal negotiation.  The families that avoided public litigation did so not through superior intelligence but through superior preparation.

The Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, is the most cited counterexample.  They spent decades building a governance structure across eleven family branches, with a family constitution, independent trustees, and a formal process for resolving disputes.  When they divided the estate in 2005, it was orderly because the infrastructure existed before the crisis arrived.  Most families wait for the crisis before building the infrastructure.  By then, it is too late.

The market understands this problem better than most families do.  On 24 February 2026, Manulife issued a single life insurance policy in Singapore with a sum insured of US$300 million — the largest individual life policy ever placed in Singapore.  Over the preceding twelve months, Manulife issued 25 individual policies in Singapore with coverage above US$50 million each.  The previous record was a US$250 million policy issued by HSBC Life in Hong Kong in 2024.

In June 2025, HSBC Life issued five jumbo policies within one month, with a combined sum insured exceeding US$420 million — five individual UHNW clients in Hong Kong, Singapore, and mainland China, three of them family policies with the coverage divided among family members.

These are not sales statistics.  They are strategic decisions made by sophisticated principals who understand that life insurance, at this scale, is not a safety net.  It is a financial engineering instrument.  The premium buys not only a death benefit but a legal architecture: a mechanism to transfer, protect, and equalise wealth at the moment of maximum vulnerability, which is the moment the founder is no longer present to manage it personally.

Three Propositions Using Jumbo Life Insurance

The short article that preceded this one addressed the standard use cases: probate bypass, keyperson cover, cross-purchase funding, estate equalisation, and the universal life policy as a trust wrapper.  Those propositions are important.  They are also familiar.  The three propositions below are less commonly articulated.  They are not niche structures.  They are logical extensions of the same instrument applied to problems the DBS almanac identifies.

Proposition One: The Generational Leverage Play

The DBS almanac found that 43 per cent of families have not involved the next generation in planning.  Thirty-three per cent delay because the founding generation will not relinquish control.  This is the tension the first proposition addresses.  The problem is not succession itself.  It is the transfer of economic power before the first generation is ready to release operating control.  The founding principal needs a mechanism to fund the next generation’s inheritance without giving them the business yet.  Premium-financed jumbo life insurance solves this with structural elegance.

The structure works as follows.  The family office — or a special purpose holding entity — applies for a large-face-value indexed universal life policy on the founder’s life.  The premiums, which on a US$50 million to US$300 million policy may run into the millions annually, are financed through a third-party lender such as a private bank or specialist premium finance firm.  The lender takes the policy’s cash surrender value as collateral.  The family retains its liquid capital in the investment portfolio, where it continues to compound.

The arithmetic is compelling when borrowing costs fall below the portfolio’s net return.  If a family’s investment book earns 8 per cent and the financing rate is 5 per cent, the spread is 300 basis points on the capital that would otherwise have been deployed to pay premiums.  The policy accumulates cash value on a tax-deferred basis.  The death benefit transfers to the next generation, or to a trust for their benefit, outside the taxable estate.  The founder retains operational control of the business throughout.

The Gracie Point International model, used by UHNW clients across Asia and the Middle East, illustrates the mechanics.  Premium finance facilities from US$10 million to US$100 million are not unusual.  The lender structures the facility against the policy’s value, not the client’s other assets, which means the family’s investment portfolio, real estate, and business interests remain unencumbered.

The strategic outcome: the founding generation simultaneously funds a legacy, preserves operating capital, and retains control.  The next generation receives a structured inheritance by contract, not by hope.  The patriarch gets to remain in charge without holding his heirs hostage to his longevity.

Proposition Two: The Concentrated-Wealth Problem

Fifty-four per cent of UHNW families in the DBS survey hold assets in their own name.  A further 52 per cent hold assets under a personal investment company.  The common thread is concentration: the wealth is not liquid, it is not diversified, and it cannot be divided neatly.  This is the problem that kills estates.  A family business worth US$200 million cannot be given in equal thirds to three children without either destroying the business — by selling it — or creating a governance crisis — by giving each child 33 per cent and no decision-making framework.  The child who runs the business resents the siblings who draw dividends without contributing.  The siblings who do not run the business distrust the one who does.  This dynamic is as old as the institution of private wealth.

Private Placement Life Insurance (PPLI) addresses the concentrated-wealth problem at the structural level.  A PPLI policy is a variable life insurance wrapper — legal in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bermuda, and other key jurisdictions — into which the family places illiquid alternative assets: private equity stakes, private credit positions, real estate funds, or concentrated holdings.  Inside the wrapper, the assets grow on a tax-deferred basis.  When the policy pays out, the death benefit transfers to the designated beneficiaries free of income tax on the accumulated growth.

For US persons or entities with exposure to US estate tax, the policy is typically held inside an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust (ILIT), which removes the death benefit from the taxable estate entirely.  For 2026, the US federal estate tax exemption is US$15 million per individual, or US$30 million for married couples.  Beyond those thresholds, the estate tax rate is 40 per cent.  On a US$200 million estate, that is a US$80 million bill payable in cash within nine months of death.

Advisers at Faegre Drinker, a US law firm, have calculated that tax-inefficient strategies can lose between 20 and 45 per cent of annual gross returns to combined federal, state, and net investment income taxes — a drag of 2.5 to 3.5 per cent annually.  The cost of the PPLI wrapper is 0.5 to 1.0 per cent annually.  The net benefit is structural and compounding.  In Asia, where capital gains tax is absent in Singapore and Hong Kong, the primary driver is not income tax avoidance but estate planning and structural clarity.  The PPLI wrapper creates a legally defined, beneficiary-designated vehicle for illiquid assets that would otherwise require a court to value and divide.  It converts a concentrated, undivided, illiquid holding into a clean financial instrument with a named recipient.

The family business stays intact.  The heirs who do not want to run it receive the insurance payout.  The heir who does want to run it buys out the others using the proceeds.  The transaction is pre-funded, pre-priced, and pre-agreed.  No court.  No valuation dispute.  No forced sale.

Proposition Three: The Business Continuity Insurance Architecture

Eighty-five per cent of family offices in the DBS survey have no formal business continuity plan, rely on informal arrangements, or cannot confirm whether one exists.  This is the statistic that deserves the most attention, and it is the one most commonly ignored.  Business continuity planning is understood in the corporate world as an operational risk management exercise: what happens if the data centre goes down, if the key supplier fails, if the CEO is hospitalised.  Large corporations run BCP drills.  They maintain redundant systems.  They fund BCP through operating budgets.

Family offices do none of this.  They are, structurally, one-person shops with investment accounts attached.  When the founder is removed from the equation — by death, incapacity, or dispute — the entire operational architecture collapses simultaneously.  The jumbo life and disability insurance structure, combined with a properly drafted trust deed and a pre-funded operational reserve, functions as a BCP for a family office.

The architecture has four components.  First: a large whole life or universal life policy on the founder’s life, with the trust as the named beneficiary.  This funds the operational gap — the period between the founder’s death and the completion of probate, the orderly transfer of authority, and the appointment of a new principal.  In Singapore, probate for an estate with overseas assets can take twelve to twenty-four months.  The insurance pays within weeks.

Second: a total permanent disability (TPD) rider, which activates on the founder’s incapacity rather than death.  The DBS almanac identifies cognitive incapacity as an underplanned risk — 54 per cent of families hold assets in their own name, which means that if the founder develops dementia, no one can legally deal with those assets without a court order.  The TPD rider provides liquidity while the family pursues the necessary legal process.

Third: a funded indemnity structure for key employees.  Family offices are lean operations.  The chief investment officer, the tax adviser, the private banker relationship — if any of these disappear simultaneously with the founder, the family office ceases to function.  A group term life structure for key staff, funded as an ongoing operating cost, provides retention incentives while ensuring the estate can recruit replacements at market rates if needed.

Fourth: an operational reserve, structured as a premium-paying participating whole life policy inside the family office holding entity, which accumulates cash value over time.  This reserve is not for investment return.  It is for operational continuity: to pay staff, service obligations, and meet creditor demands during the period of institutional disruption that follows any major succession event.

Singapore’s single-family office ecosystem illustrates the scale of the need.  Family offices in Singapore have quadrupled since 2020 and now exceed 1,000.  The city-state had 244,800 millionaires as of the end of 2024, with 336 individuals holding assets above US$100 million and 30 billionaires.  The overwhelming majority of these offices are operationally dependent on one or two people.  The market for BCP-oriented insurance architecture for this segment is, in McKinsey’s terminology, an untapped prize.

The Strategic Consequence of Getting This Wrong

The DBS almanac frames the problem in terms of individual families.  The strategic consequence extends beyond any single estate.  Cerulli’s projection of US$124 trillion in transfers through 2048 means the world’s capital stock will be redistributed more rapidly in the next two decades than at any previous point in modern history.  This redistribution does not happen smoothly.  It happens at the point of death, at varying levels of preparation, through legal systems in multiple jurisdictions, in the presence of family dynamics that have not been tested under financial stress.  The families that plan will transfer wealth intact.  The families that do not will transfer wealth to their lawyers.

The economic consequence of unplanned transfers is not academic.  Family businesses employ a significant share of the Asian workforce.  A disorderly succession in a major family enterprise — a forced sale, a breakup, a court-ordered partition — does not merely inconvenience the heirs.  It disrupts suppliers, employees, and the communities dependent on the enterprise.  The 70 per cent failure rate that the Williams Group documents is not a private loss.  It is, in aggregate, a productivity and employment story.

The life insurance industry in Asia has understood this for longer than most advisers admit.  The product exists.  The market exists.  The clients exist.  What has been missing is the framing: not life insurance as a product sold on the back of mortality anxiety, but life insurance as the operational and financial infrastructure that makes a multi-generational enterprise survivable.

The Conclusion

The DBS almanac identifies five structural failures across more than 200 family offices.  Each failure has a name.  Each name has an instrument.  The instruments are not new.  They are not complicated.  They require no proprietary technology and no novel legal structure.  They require a conversation that most founding principals are unwilling to have, because having it means acknowledging that the enterprise does not end when they do.  It means separating their identity from the institution they built.  It means, in the most practical sense, planning for a future in which they are not present.

The 33 per cent who refuse because they want to remain in control will eventually lose control.  The only question is whether they lose it to a plan or to a coroner.  Life insurance does not ask for a confession of mortality.  It asks for a signature.  The difference in outcome — between an estate transferred by contract and an estate transferred by litigation — is not measured in principles.  It is measured in the percentage of the total that the heirs receive.  That percentage can be very high, or it can be very much lower.  The instrument is the same.  The choice is the founder’s.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code