About SPDF Group.
A licensed Dutch corporate and fiduciary services firm, headquartered in Amsterdam and serving clients globally through a network of professional partners and offices.
SPDF Group is a licensed Dutch firm providing corporate and fiduciary services — company management, family office services, fund administration, accounting and compliance — to international clients whose arrangements call for careful administration across more than one jurisdiction. The firm holds the regulatory authorisations under which the work of a fiduciary services provider may properly be undertaken in the Netherlands, and we treat those authorisations as the central determinant of what we will and will not accept as an engagement. We provide services within the scope of our licences; we accept work only where we are properly authorised to undertake it; and we conduct ourselves in a manner consistent with the standards expected of a regulated firm.
We do not provide legal or tax advice. The services we provide are services; they are not advice. Where an engagement requires advice on a matter of Dutch or other law, or on a matter of tax in any jurisdiction, that advice is properly the work of the client’s own legal and tax advisers, with whom we are accustomed to working in close conjunction. The separation between the services we provide and the advice that lies outside our scope is, in our view, a feature of the professional discipline of the fiduciary services profession, and one we maintain rigorously.
The firm is headquartered in Amsterdam. The substantive regulated work — the directorships we hold, the structures we administer, the books we keep, the filings we make — is conducted from Amsterdam, under Dutch law and Dutch regulatory supervision. The Dutch licence is the spine of the firm; the work is anchored there.
Our practice nevertheless serves clients whose affairs extend well beyond the Netherlands, and we are set up accordingly. We work through a network of professional partners and offices in the jurisdictions in which our clients’ arrangements ordinarily touch — lawyers, accountants, fiduciary firms and other specialists with whom we have worked over a number of years and whose work we know. The arrangement allows us to serve clients globally without representing capabilities we do not in fact possess. Where a structure necessarily touches a jurisdiction in which we do not ourselves provide services, our clients receive the benefit of a network of firms whose standards are known to us, rather than the alternative of being introduced to a firm chosen at random.
Personnel within the firm — including the principal and the CFO — hold the STEP qualification, which is the recognised professional standard for trust and estate practitioners and the established benchmark in family office and succession work. The firm’s anti-money-laundering work is conducted by personnel holding the CAMS certification awarded by the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, which is the corresponding professional standard for anti-money-laundering practice. The qualifications are not peripheral credentials but the working standards against which the relevant engagements are calibrated.
Our clients come to us through three principal channels, each of which says something useful about the firm. They are referred by the lawyers, accountants and professional intermediaries within our network and beyond it, in matters where the quality of execution is the criterion against which the working relationship has been formed. They find us directly, by way of their own research and the considered recommendations of their existing advisers, and they make the initial approach themselves. And they are introduced by their banking counterparties, which is to say by institutions whose compliance functions have a settled view of the firms with which their clients are well advised to do business, and whose introduction is consequently not lightly given.
We are, by considered choice, a small firm. The personnel a client engages with at the outset of a matter are the personnel who undertake the work; there is no intermediate layer of less senior staff between the client and the director or manager with primary responsibility for the engagement, and there is no offshore service centre to which the substantive work is despatched. The structure of the firm is, in that respect, the structure of the service.
What we believe
The traditional virtues of the fiduciary profession are not in fashion in the broader commercial environment, but they remain, in our settled view, the right ones. Discretion, by which we mean the practised habit of saying neither more nor less than the work requires. Attention to detail, by which we mean the close and continuous administration of arrangements whose proper functioning depends upon precisely such administration. The taking of the long view, by which we mean a working presumption that the arrangements we administer are intended to outlast the circumstances that gave rise to them, and ought to be designed and conducted on that footing. And a clear separation, maintained as a matter of professional discipline, between what a client asks for, what is in the client’s interest properly understood, and what the law and regulation require — together with the willingness to say so plainly, in writing, when those three things diverge.
The clients for whom we are well suited are those who want a firm that takes that view. Trusts intended to function for thirty years and more. Holding structures that must accommodate developments which neither the client nor their advisers can today fully anticipate. Family arrangements whose succession provisions are required to operate effectively in jurisdictions whose underlying law will itself, in the course of time, change. The work rewards patience, and exacts a high standard of those who undertake it; we have arranged the firm with the intention of being able to provide services to that standard.