Family Office Solutions (FOS) Series | Zurich Edition

Michael J. Oliver was a co-founder of Global Partnership Family Offices in 2009. He has spent over 30 years teaching at various universities in the UK, US and France and has combined this with a practical application of economics to offer executive education, workshops and a broad range of consultancy for family offices and high-profile corporations. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the Open University and has published extensively on monetary history, exchange rate regimes and macroeconomic policy. Michael has been an economic adviser to the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel and a member of the Migration Policy Development Board on the island of Jersey where he lives.

Ruth Bloch-Riemer’s practice focuses on domestic and international tax law, regularly advising Swiss and foreign high net worth individuals in all taxation matters, particularly with regard to wealth and succession planning, taxation of art and artists, as well as regarding domestic and international structuring and coordination of pension and social security, including both compliance work and non-contentious procedures as well as litigations. Ruth teaches, i.a. within the University of Zurich's LLM program on international tax law, is a frequent lecturer in domestic and international conferences and regularly publishes in her area of expertise. Ruth was ranked several times in major rankings.

Simon Minder is an independent family office advisor with over 17 years of experience in the family office industry. Primarily, he supports families and single-family offices as member of the investment committee and/or represents them as a member of the board of directors for one of their investments. In addition, he supports families in setting up their family office. As part of this offering, he helps in the selection process for a suitable software solution. He also supports existing family offices in the selection and/or replacement process of software solutions.

Edouard Thijssen is Co-Founder and CEO of Trusted Family, and a next generation member from a multigenerational business family from Belgium. He graduated in 2007 from the Solvay Business School. He has also completed the Leading the Family Business program at IMD in Switzerland. When he turned 20, Edouard realized that his business family was getting bigger, spreading out in different cities & countries, that the majority of family members didn’t have an active role in the business, and that people started to have different ownership stakes. Complexity was increasing, and different boards & committees were set up. He came up with the idea to develop a mobile app and online governance platform to improve Board, Shareholder and Family governance for his own family business and family office. After successfully launching it for his family, he quickly realized that many other enterprising families around the world had similar needs, and co-founded Trusted Family with Edouard Janssen. Edouard grew up in Belgium, then moved to NYC for 5 years and is currently based in London.

Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany 1 year Warton School of Economics, Philadelphia 4 years University of St.Gallen 1888-1995: founded and ran retail company with 4 shops in Germany from 1996: Real Estate developments in Germany, later in Switzerland and the USA from 2007: Mutschler-Ventures for early stage investments in start-up companies (around 50 investments) 4 investments in Designer Outlets in Germany, Croatia and Portugal Family-shareholder in Berenberg-Bank, Hamburg Shareholder and on Supervisory Board of Bergos Private Bank, Zurich Shareholder and Member of Supervisory Board Auto1 Member of Advisory Board of AvS Trusted Advisors