David Bowen

Spear’s Review

David Bowen is a partner at EY who specialises in helping international families design, build and operate single family offices. He operates within the Big Four firm’s private client practice in London, which he tells Spear’s ‘offers the most comprehensive service for HNWs’. Under this umbrella, he leads the UK and Ireland family office advisory arm, which offers services that include benchmarking, risk reviewing and transforming existing structures.

The personable Bowen is no stranger to complexities around both international and domestic structures and operates on a cross-border basis. But he notes that while there is a desire for more simplification within the private client industry, families are finding themselves wedged between international and domestic structures – both working in tandem to reflect how international they are becoming. Structures now need to serve both the needs of individual family members ‘and the collective family as a whole as well’, he adds.

Adviser Profile 

David Bowen is an EY Partner in London and leads our Family Office Practice for UK&I. He has over 20 years of experience in partnering with families, advising them on the set-up, review and transformation, and institutionalisation/professionalisation of single family offices and wider organisational structures.

He works with some of the world’s wealthiest and most complex international and domestic clients, providing a single point of sophisticated advice through which delivery of complex solutions for multi-jurisdictional clients and their families is co-ordinated. 

He has significant experience in all areas of family office design, build and transformation, including family office strategy and planning, benchmarking and consulting, risk reviews, and the creation of sophisticated investment entities. 

His practice is multi-disciplinary, enabling families to consider their cross-generational/successional needs effectively by using proprietary design and review processes which consider the interdependencies between the family, their operating businesses and their wealth collectively before considering the organisational structure required to support these and the effective operational frameworks and governance to support the family’s strategic vision and desired legacy/purpose. 

He has worked with clients from all over the world and is able to bring practical insight from how other families from different cultures have approached similar issues. This ensures that the strategic decisions his clients make are from a well-informed basis, but it also ensures that the solutions he and his team implement for clients are pragmatic and not theoretical. 

He is a regular speaker at international conferences on the development and evolution of the family office industry and has written numerous articles/thought leadership pieces for major industry publications.