Smaller World. Faster Vault.

Following the enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, banks around the world — most particularly in the established offshore jurisdictions — by and large declined new business with United States clients. Compliance cost rose; appetite for the United States market fell. The retreat continues.

Among the banks that did choose to continue serving United States clients, many became sufficiently risk-averse that they declined accounts associated with asset-protection structures, or — worse — froze accounts already established when a client subsequently became the subject of adverse litigation. The structures continued to function. The banking that supported them did not.

The firm has long observed this trend at close range and has, over the same span of years, built proprietary custodial arrangements specifically for clients in such circumstances. Those arrangements remain in place. They are, however, no longer the only answer.

For United States clients whose circumstances are stable — solvent, not in litigation, not facing imminent threat — the United States itself remains the most flexible and cost-effective market for banking and wealth-management services in the world. Properly structured domestic planning, executed in coordination with the firm’s onshore vehicles, can carry substantial weight while conditions allow.

The firm continues to design and administer such plans. Most clients pass through life without ever needing the offshore protective machinery to be brought into action.

When circumstances change — when a creditor materializes, when litigation issues, when the political or regulatory wind shifts unfavourably — the question becomes how to move and hold value at speed, in a place a creditor cannot effectively reach. Conventional banking is increasingly unable to answer that question.

The contemporary answer — and, increasingly, the preferred answer — is the migration of value onto the blockchain. Digital assets, properly composed and properly held, move at light speed: displacement that once required correspondent banks across multiple time zones now completes in minutes. Situated in the right vehicle and the right custodial environment, such assets are largely impervious to creditor threat.

This is not speculation about a future that may or may not arrive. It is the practical answer the firm presently uses for a growing share of its wealth-preservation clients.

The firm’s recent joining with a major international fintech group brings expert resources to bear on the two questions digital custody actually turns on: composition — what assets, held in what proportions, under what governing instruments — and custody — held where, by whom, under what controls, and protected against what failure modes, technical and legal alike.

Several non-banking alternatives that rival or surpass the services historically provided by brick-and-mortar banking are now available to the firm’s clients through this relationship. The firm does not endorse particular venues or particular instruments; the assessment is matter by matter. What the firm offers is the discipline that has always defined its work — the appropriate vehicle, in the appropriate jurisdiction, under appropriate fiduciary supervision — now applied to a custodial layer that did not exist when the firm began this work in 1982.

The statutes still work. The structures still hold. The vault has simply gotten faster — and, for the clients who need it most, very much harder to reach.