IFA.AE Private Office

Your financial life is not a collection of products.

Property. Investments. Pensions. Businesses. Borrowing. Protection. Residency. Family. Estate planning.

Individually, each may require specialist advice. Together, they form your financial position.

The IFA.AE Private Office begins by understanding the whole picture.

Start a Private Office Conversation
Light-filled contemporary residence with limestone walls and tall glazing overlooking a distant city skyline across water.

The Whole Position

Before looking at individual solutions, understand where you stand.

A client's financial life can extend across different assets, liabilities, jurisdictions, businesses, currencies and generations.

The Private Office approach is designed to bring those elements into one coherent conversation.

01

What you own

  • Property
  • Investments
  • Pensions
  • Business interests
  • Cash and other assets
02

What you owe

  • Mortgages
  • Property finance
  • Business borrowing
  • Other liabilities
03

What supports your position

  • Income
  • Business cash flow
  • Investment income
  • Future liquidity
  • Protection
04

What you want to achieve

  • Lifestyle
  • Growth
  • Retirement
  • Property
  • Family
  • Succession
  • Legacy

The Private Office

One position. Different disciplines.

A client's objectives may involve several areas of professional advice.

The Private Office helps establish the wider context before individual requirements are considered through the relevant professional or regulated service.

The Value of Advice

Good advice should help you make better decisions, not simply buy better products.

A mortgage can be arranged. An investment can be selected. A pension can be reviewed. Protection can be put in place. Estate planning can be undertaken.

But each individual decision sits within a much bigger financial life.

The more important questions are often:

  • Why are we doing it?
  • How does it connect to everything else?
  • What could change?
  • And what should happen next?

The Private Office exists to help bring those questions into the same conversation.

  1. 01

    Understand

    See the whole position.

    Understand the assets, liabilities, income, property, businesses, family circumstances and objectives that shape financial decisions.

  2. 02

    Plan

    Give the position direction.

    Establish what you are trying to achieve, what resources are available and which decisions may need to be made.

  3. 03

    Protect

    Consider what could disrupt the plan.

    Identify the events, risks and changing circumstances that could materially affect what matters to you.

  4. 04

    Adapt

    Keep the plan alive.

    Review the position as your life, family, markets, rules and the wider world change.

  5. 05

    Transfer

    Think beyond the individual.

    Consider what ultimately happens to your wealth, property, businesses and responsibilities, and to the people who follow.

A person reading by a large window overlooking water, a child's drawing and coloured pencils on the oak table nearby.

The Human Element

Not every important financial decision can be reduced to a calculation.

Money is connected to life. Markets can create uncertainty. Property can carry emotional attachment. Retirement can change the way someone thinks about spending. Supporting family or transferring wealth can involve decisions that are personal as well as financial.

Sometimes good advice means identifying an opportunity or recognising a risk. Sometimes it means connecting two parts of a client's financial life that had previously been considered separately. And sometimes it means helping someone make an important decision, or encouraging them not to make one too quickly.

Judgement, context and conversation remain important parts of financial planning.

Your Position

  • What you own.
  • What you owe.
  • What you earn.
  • What you need.
  • Who depends upon you.
  • What you are trying to achieve.

Your Horizon

What is changing around you that could affect those things?

We cannot know exactly what the future will bring.

But we can think seriously about what could change, and what it could mean for you.

Private Office planning starts with your position today and keeps one eye on the world that position will have to live in tomorrow.

The IFA.AE Private Office submarine beneath a calm sea at sunset, its periscope raised toward a distant city skyline on the horizon.

Private Office Perspective

Looking beyond the horizon.

Areas the Private Office may observe and discuss with clients, and what changes within them could mean for their wealth, property, businesses and families.

01

Resources

Water · Energy · Food · Infrastructure

02

Economics

Inflation · Interest rates · Currencies · Government finances · Markets

03

Geopolitics

Trade · International relationships · Regulation · Movement of capital

04

Technology

AI · Automation · Productivity · Employment · Business models

05

People & Longevity

Demographics · Healthcare · Family · Inheritance

06

Property & Place

Property · Residency · Taxation · Jurisdictions · Lifestyle

These are areas of observation and discussion. They are not forecasts, and they are not investment recommendations.

Explore Our Insights
Atmospheric editorial image of contemporary Gulf towers in morning haze, reflected in calm water.

International lives require international thinking

Wealth rarely respects borders.

Clients may have connections involving several of the following, and future intentions can move them again. Decisions that are sensible in isolation can look different when the whole map is considered.

  • The United Kingdom
  • The United Arab Emirates
  • Europe
  • International property
  • Overseas pensions and investments
  • Different currencies
  • Changing residency
  • Family in different jurisdictions

We do not offer legal or tax conclusions, and we do not suggest that any one jurisdiction or structure is universally preferable. Cross-border circumstances routinely require jurisdiction-specific advice from appropriately qualified legal, tax, regulatory or other professional advisers, and part of the Private Office role is establishing which of those are needed, in which order.

Where a client’s circumstances involve additional legal, regulatory, banking or jurisdictional considerations, these must be established at the outset and may require advice or approval from appropriately qualified specialists and institutions.

Related: Returning UK Expats · QROPS & UK pension transfers · Dubai · International Estate Planning

Atmospheric editorial image of an old oak beside a young sapling, with a country house in late afternoon light.

Beyond the Individual

A financial plan can extend beyond one lifetime.

For many clients, wealth is ultimately connected to other people: partners, children, grandchildren, business partners and future beneficiaries.

Planning may therefore involve not only creating and protecting wealth, but considering how assets, responsibilities and decisions pass from one generation to another.

Explore IFA Estate and estate planning for returning UAE expats.

Advice, and coordination

What we explain and introduce, and what we coordinate.

We help you see the whole picture, explain general planning considerations and introduce you to the appropriately authorised professional who will advise you. Both columns are part of our coordination role; neither replaces professional advice.

We introduce

Professional introductions

  • Investments & portfolio oversight

    We coordinate investment questions and introduce appropriately authorised professionals, who advise you directly.

  • Pensions & retirement

    We explain general pension planning considerations and introduce appropriately authorised professionals for advice on pensions, transfers and retirement.

  • Protection

    We help frame life, illness and income protection questions and introduce appropriately authorised insurance professionals.

  • Estate & succession planning

    We coordinate estate planning questions and introduce qualified legal, tax and appropriately authorised financial professionals for advice and drafting.

  • Business & entrepreneurial wealth

    We coordinate questions about ownership, liquidity and succession and introduce the appropriately qualified or authorised professionals who advise.

  • Family governance & intergenerational planning

    Coordinated with legal and tax specialists where structures are involved.

We coordinate

Coordinated

  • Tax

    We do not give tax advice. We work alongside your accountant or tax adviser, or introduce one.

  • Law, trusts & corporate structures

    Legal advice is given by qualified lawyers. We coordinate and hold the thread.

  • International & cross-border matters

    Jurisdiction-specific conclusions require local qualified advice; we sequence and convene it.

  • Banking, custody & liquidity

    Arrangements sit with banks and custodians. We help you frame the questions and keep the picture whole.

  • Property

    Lending, conveyancing and local property tax sit with specialists.

  • Your existing professional advisers

    We work alongside them. Nobody has to be replaced for us to be useful.

Direct regulated advice is provided by the appropriately authorised professional or firm we introduce, under their own terms of engagement, confirmed in writing before any advice is given. IFA.AE does not provide regulated financial advice. IFA Private Office does not provide legal, tax, banking, custody, immigration or sanctions advice.

Start with the Whole Position

Everything starts with a conversation.

Tell us where you are, what you are trying to achieve and what matters to you.

The Private Office can then help establish the wider picture and identify which conversations may be appropriate next.

An introductory conversation is confidential, without obligation, and intended to establish the shape of the position rather than to sell anything. Please do not send account numbers, asset values or identity documents in a first message.

Explore Private Client Property Finance
Do your circumstances cross more than one country?
Preferred method of contact

We do not ask for asset values or account details at this stage, and never will by email.

How we use your information

Before the consultation

If you would prefer the conversation to start from facts rather than from introductions, you may complete the Financial Position Review first. It is a confidential pre-consultation assessment. It is not onboarding, it is not advice, and it does not authorise us to act.

Where property or liquidity is the starting point, the Private Office Property & Liquidity Assessment considers property finance in the context of your wider position.

Private client consultation

Your next step starts with a conversation.

Whether you're considering international property finance, refinancing, investment opportunities or broader financial planning, a confidential initial conversation can help establish your priorities and the options worth exploring.

Chris Wicks

Private Client Consultation

An initial consultation is exploratory. It does not, by itself, establish an advisory relationship or constitute a recommendation.

Select a date and time from Chris's live calendar. Availability is shown by Calendly, our booking provider.

Choose a convenient time for an introductory Zoom conversation.

The calendar is provided by Calendly and loads only when you choose to book; Calendly may set its own cookies. See our Privacy Policy. Prefer a new tab? Open Chris's booking page.