International Clients: Why Your Home Country Matters More Than Your Bank’s Location #
If you have substantial wealth and live outside your financial advisor’s home country, you’re an international client. This matters because tax laws, regulations, and financial structures don’t work the same way across borders. A strategy that’s brilliant for a U.S. resident might create a tax nightmare for someone in Canada or the UK.
Most wealth management firms say they serve international clients. What they mean is they’ll take your money even if you live abroad. That’s not the same as understanding how capital gains work in your jurisdiction, or knowing which account structures actually make sense under your tax code.
Take Canadians with significant digital asset holdings. You can’t just copy-paste American crypto tax strategies. Canada treats these assets differently. If you have over $10 million in digital assets, you might shift holdings into a private corporation and time disposals to years with lower income. You could use a family trust to split gains among beneficiaries in lower tax brackets. Planning dispositions across multiple tax years can smooth out your tax bills instead of getting hammered all at once. And you need proper custody solutions, not just whatever exchange is convenient. This isn’t general advice, this is the kind of specific planning that requires someone who actually knows Canadian tax law.
The difference between registered investment advisors and broker-dealers comes down to how they get paid and who they work for. RIAs charge fees and work for you. Broker-dealers earn commissions and technically represent the firms that employ them. This creates different legal obligations.
That legal obligation is called fiduciary duty. A fiduciary must put your interests first, not just recommend something “suitable.” It’s the difference between a doctor prescribing what you need versus a salesperson suggesting what earns them the best commission. For international clients, this matters more because cross-border mistakes are expensive and often irreversible.
Asset custody is about who physically holds your investments. Your advisor should never have direct access to move your money. Proper custody means a separate, regulated institution safeguards your assets. For digital holdings, this means secure cold storage solutions, not assets sitting on an exchange where you’re exposed to platform risk.
Wealth management changes at different asset levels because the problems change. Below $1 million, you need basic planning and diversification. Between $1 million and $10 million, tax strategy and estate planning become crucial. Above $10 million, you’re dealing with multi-generational wealth transfer, complex entity structures, and coordinating teams of specialists.
That’s where family office services come in. These go past investment management into complete financial coordination. Multi-generational planning that accounts for how wealth will pass and grow across decades. Estate and succession work that structures entities properly. Tax strategy that looks across all your holdings and jurisdictions. The kind of concierge-level coordination where someone is actually thinking about your entire financial picture, not just your portfolio.
Digital Wealth Partners provides registered investment advisor services including wealth management, investment advisory, asset custody, financial planning, and fiduciary guidance. For situations that require deeper coordination across multiple areas, Digital Ascension Group offers family office services that extend into multi-generational planning, estate and succession coordination, tax strategy oversight, and philanthropic planning.
Contact Digital Ascension Group to learn how our family office services can coordinate your complete financial picture.
