Family Business Audiocast | Episode 46 | Laura Gambineri
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R. Adam Smith: Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I'm R. Adam Smith, creator of this Audiocast series as an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years. I'm fortunate for my many experiences within the family firm industry. A warm thank you to our live audience on LinkedIn today, and for those listening in the future, a brief comment on why I created this broadcast.
Private companies are a passion of mine. Having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards, with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices, I founded this series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem.
Whether you're a family business owner, building, running, or advising a family office, or just expanding your family office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. Now it's time to turn our attention to our accomplished guest on today's episode. Today, I'm pleased to host Laura Gambineri here with us on the Family Business Audiocast.
Laura, it's great to have you.
Laura Gambineri: Thank you so much, Adam. Very excited to be here.
R. Adam Smith: Yeah, I'm glad you were able to make it on, and I look forward to getting to know you better. Now I'm going to talk a bit about you and your bio. Laura Nanette Gambineri-Giese is a leading expert in cross-border estate planning as well as elite private placement life insurance, and she also works in family governance. She is the founder of Trusted Governance and also works at Crown Global Insurance Group.
She works with ultra-high-net-worth individuals and their advisors to design sophisticated wealth structuring strategies that are both globally compliant and deeply personal and customized, focusing on clients in the US and UK primarily. Laura brings a nuanced understanding of regulatory, cultural, and family dynamics to her work. She is a trusted estate practitioner with advanced STEP certification in family business advising and governance, known for aligning technical precision with values-based planning. Through her work, Laura empowers families and family offices to preserve wealth across generations while fostering clarity, continuity, and shared purpose.
Fantastic to have you here today, Laura. Why don't we talk a little about what you do, and tell us about Trusted Governance — and then we'll dig into some dialogue.
Laura Gambineri: Sure, thank you so much for the great introduction — couldn't have been done any better.
I've been working in the private placement life insurance industry for over a decade now. I work together with my father and a team of others, so it's almost a little family business itself. Through this, we've established trusted relationships with many of the families we work with in the high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth space.
What we noticed is that once you've accumulated a certain level of wealth as a family or individual, a lot of doors open for you — service providers come at you from every angle, everyone has "the best solution" or "the best structure" for you. But what's often missing is the emotional part behind closed doors. We still see a lot of fighting, especially around inheritance and estates once someone has passed away. I love families, I love working with families, and I always found it sad that a lot of these fights could have been avoided with better communication beforehand. That's what led me into family governance several years ago, and later to establishing Trusted Governance.
R. Adam Smith: Wonderful. It's a vast industry, especially in Europe, where family office structures and larger family enterprises have been building for centuries. The US and Southeast Asia are catching up, but in Europe — especially around Switzerland and Liechtenstein — multi-generational families and family offices are the norm. Tell us briefly about that ecosystem.
Laura Gambineri: There's a lot of structuring involved, not just in Switzerland but across continental Europe, particularly in civil law countries. Because of certain legal frameworks, we can do things like work with foundations, but we also face complicated legal frameworks — forced heirship rules, limited recognition of trusts — that can make planning more complex.
What we see a lot in Europe, and in Switzerland specifically, is that families rely heavily on informal structures and centralized leadership, especially in the first generation. Family governance is becoming bigger and more formal over the years, though the term itself can still feel too formal for many families. But there are many family offices established over generations working on their own terms to support continuity, fairness, and long-term vision.
R. Adam Smith: It's a delicate balance between the organizational dynamics — culture, structuring knowledge, best practices — and the urgency or willingness to make tricky legal and structural decisions. You sit at the intersection of insurance product design and family dynamics. Talk about balancing the technical rigor with the interpersonal relationships needed for family agreements.
Laura Gambineri: That's a good point — you always want to look at the intersection of product design and family dynamics. The technical side — ownership structures, control, access — solves the "what" and the "how." Governance answers the "why" and the "who." Skip the governance side, and even the most technically perfect structure can fall apart.
We always start with the family — their goals, values, how they make decisions, how they communicate — and then reverse-engineer the technical structure to support those dynamics, not the other way around. We also build in flexibility, because families evolve, and what works today may not work in five years, especially once new generations step in. I often find myself acting as a translator — speaking with legal and tax teams to understand the family's real needs, then translating what the structure actually means for the family, and vice versa.
R. Adam Smith: I've worked extensively in single-family office structuring and alternative investing, and previously in M&A, often involved in pre-sale planning and larger financings — there's a lot of wealth and trust planning that happens before those transactions. At Trusted Governance, what does governance design mean today, and how do you infuse technical wealth structuring into governance to protect clients' wealth, especially heading into a large transaction?
Laura Gambineri: In theory, governance and technical structuring work hand in hand — governance sets the direction (who's involved, what the values are, how decisions get made), and structuring supports that with the right tools.
In practice, though, they're often handled in silos. Lawyers and tax advisors focus on efficient structures, while families focus on trust, fairness, and relationships between generations and individuals. When these two sides don't connect, problems emerge — structures become too rigid, family members feel excluded, or there's a mismatch between legal ownership and perceived roles ("I own these shares, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with them").
That's where we step in — bridging the two worlds, making sure structures reflect the family's actual intent rather than just the tax code. We facilitate conversations, clarify roles, and connect the dots between trustee appointments, voting rights, family charters, and councils. It comes down to sitting with each family member individually, understanding what keeps them up at night, and then bringing the family together. Done right, the structure becomes a platform for good governance rather than a barrier to it.
R. Adam Smith: These projects can take months or a year. Walk us through the range of a more complex project — say, multi-generational (G1, G2), a large illiquid cross-border asset, different domiciles, estate tax considerations, waterfall distributions, multiple children (some in the company, some outside), possibly a former spouse.
Laura Gambineri: It can get really complex. The more family members involved, the longer it takes. Initially, families often want to set a tight timeline — "let's get this done in three months" — without realizing how much work actually goes into it.
Not every family member is always in the right headspace for these deep conversations and interviews. You have to keep things professional — appointments, commitment from everyone — but also stay flexible, since life happens: family events, illness, trauma, vacations. People need time to prepare and reflect.
I usually tell families not to expect real changes before 12 to 18 months of work. And these plans are really meant to last a lifetime — not about me holding their hand forever, since I don't have time for that either, but about building a plan that works for the family and gets revisited regularly.
R. Adam Smith: Let's talk about that revisiting. Once the structuring — illiquidity to liquidity, multi-generational planning, trusts, estates, allocations, private banking — reaches some form of agreement, what happens next in terms of ongoing tracking and reporting for the family?
Laura Gambineri: It really depends on the individual family, but generally, if a family has large performance-based investments — subject to market volatility, like we're seeing a lot of right now — they should sit down every quarter or so with a few family members to review the numbers.
More broadly, plans need to be revisited often. What works today won't work forever — regulations change (CRS, global minimum taxes), people change residency, and rules shift, like the UK recently abolishing its non-dom regime. On one hand, you want an annual check-in: are we still aligned with our values and goals? On the other, certain events — like a regulatory change — force you to revisit the structure itself, maybe consider additional tools like PPLI, and check whether new structures still align with governance, or whether goals have shifted because a jurisdiction is no longer as tax-friendly. Big life events — a death, divorce, marriage, someone new joining the family with influence — also need to be factored into the plan.
R. Adam Smith: What are some overlooked risks in cross-border estate planning — the things you highlight to avoid unnecessary taxable events across different domiciles?
Laura Gambineri: A few big ones. One of the biggest is a mismatch between tax residency and succession laws — families with assets and heirs in different countries can suddenly face forced heirship rules or asset issues no one saw coming.
Another is illiquidity — families can be asset-rich but struggle to find cash when estate taxes or probate costs hit, especially across multiple jurisdictions at once.
There's also exposure at the beneficiary level — divorce, creditors, even public visibility — all of which create risks families haven't planned for. And finally, people often underestimate how local treaties or tax rules can clash within an overall plan — a structure that works well in one country or state may cause problems in another. That's where PPLI can really help, when carefully tailored and fully compliant, by unifying planning across borders.
R. Adam Smith: On the globalization of wealth and families moving between Europe and the US — I'm seeing more American G1 owners of family businesses moving to Europe as a lifestyle choice, to France, Italy, or the UK, sometimes seeking EU citizenship, even as children stay in the US. How does that affect wealth planning?
Laura Gambineri: It's genuinely complex if not done correctly — whether it's pre-migration planning, full expatriation, or a partial move. I always advise families to sit down with an expert advisor and plan ahead rather than jumping into a new jurisdiction. The wine and estates in France look great — and they are — but moving there can bring a lot of side effects.
The US, and common law countries generally like the UK, have very formal tools — trusts, LLCs — supported by their legal and tax environment, making certain planning straightforward. Move into continental Europe or civil law countries, and that can disrupt a lot of that structuring — some countries don't recognize trusts at all, and Switzerland doesn't even have an official trust law, even though you'll find trustees here. We're also seeing people move to the Middle East to build businesses, which raises its own considerations, like Sharia law complexities. It really comes down to planning ahead, understanding forced heirship and other rules in the destination, and ensuring dual compliance across the structures you implement.
R. Adam Smith: You work in a family business yourself, alongside your father. That must give you a personal lens on family dynamics and legacy — a core theme of this podcast. What's your own view on legacy, both personally and among your clients?
Laura Gambineri: For me it's always felt natural — I've worked with my father for over a decade, and we're a strong team, whether on the insurance or governance side. People notice that and often ask how we avoid fighting — it really comes down to open communication. As for legacy, I don't think there's one definition. It's really about what you're trying to leave behind.
R. Adam Smith: As someone who's a "tweener" generation yourself, what are you seeing in Europe among the next generation — say, millennials in their late twenties to late thirties — in how they approach legacy and balance wealth with lifestyle?
Laura Gambineri: Legacy is what you want people to remember about you — what values or principles guide you, whose lives you're touching, what you're building or nurturing that will outlive you. And the next generation is very much thinking about that. They're climate-conscious, with a lot of climate-conscious investing. Philanthropy is big and increasingly used as a strategic tool rather than something performative. Business models aim to be sustainable and inclusive.
Bottom line: the next gen in Europe is daring to ask not just "how do we keep things going" but "why are we doing all of this?" That mindset shift is redefining both governance and legacy — from something purely inherited to something they actively shape. They don't just want to inherit from their parents; they want to use part of that inheritance to build and shape their own lives and leave something behind.
R. Adam Smith: Great. You can reach Laura Nanette Gambineri on LinkedIn directly, or through Trusted Governance LLC, or the Crown Global Insurance Group, both based in Zurich — a wonderful, beautiful city.
Laura Gambineri: You can definitely visit.
R. Adam Smith: I love visiting — I was actually there the week of the Credit Suisse crisis. There was a lot of movement going on, the fancy chocolate shop and restaurant across the street were quite busy with people in meetings, all juxtaposed against the stoic Pictet office nearby.
Laura Gambineri: Yeah, I know which one — it's a lovely place.
R. Adam Smith: And the hotel they renovated next door, right? Recently.
Laura Gambineri: Correct — the Mandarin Oriental, I believe.
R. Adam Smith: One last thing — a couple months ago you posted on LinkedIn about collaboration among professionals in this competitive industry. I thought it was a great post — talk a bit about how you collaborate within the vendor and advisor ecosystem for family offices and enterprises.
Laura Gambineri: Thank you — I'm always glad when posts resonate. Collaboration is absolutely foundational, not just in governance but in insurance and really every industry. Governance touches legal frameworks, tax and structuring, family dynamics, emotional legacy, and business strategy — very different disciplines that all need to work in sync with the family and its values.
I'm a bit critical of anyone claiming to be a "one-stop shop" — there's so much to the family ecosystem that no single person can cover it all. I try to collaborate across disciplines: legal, tax, therapists quite often, wealth planners, custodians, asset managers, and more.
R. Adam Smith: It's quite a vast ecosystem — Zug, Geneva, Zurich, Liechtenstein, Vienna — you could build a whole business just in those areas, let alone across Europe. Great to have you on today, and looking forward to working with you in the future. Thank you for joining.
Laura Gambineri: Thank you so much, Adam.
R. Adam Smith: I'd like to thank our Family Business Audiocast attendees today, and of course our guest, Laura Nanette Gambineri. This is R. Adam Smith, signing off. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Family Business Audiocast, available live on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X.
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Explore the strategic intricacies of family business success with the RAS Family Business Audiocast. Join R. Adam Smith as he delves into exclusive discussions with global leaders shaping the future of private wealth and enterprise. Each episode offers a rare glimpse into the core decisions driving prosperity in high-stakes markets. Tune in to gain expert insights and innovative strategies that empower family businesses to thrive across generations.
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