Where private wealth is heading, and the architecture each chapter requires.

Sixteen years into the practice, the firm closes the chapter that ended 2025 with the same posture it began with: private, retained, accountable, and slow on purpose. The HNW and UHNW families whose architectures are held here — across Canada and the United States — have, between them, weathered a year in which the macro register changed three times and the family register changed not at all. That, in the end, is what an architecture is meant to do.

This letter sets down what changed in the work, what held, and what the firm sees in the year ahead. It is written for the HNW and UHNW families on our file in Canada and the United States, for the lawyers and accountants who introduce them to us, and for the readers who follow Perspectives between letters.

I · The year that closedA year measured by what did not need to be done.

The instinct of the industry, in a year like 2025, is to act — to rebalance, to hedge, to publish a view, to reach out. The instinct of a coordinated mandate is the opposite. The architecture is composed precisely so that volatility in the headline is met with stillness in the file.

Three liquidity events were closed without restructuring — one in Canada, two cross-border. Nine families completed annual resets without material change. Cross-border households revisited succession instruments authored a decade earlier and found them, on review, still fit. The work that was done was the work that always is: annual reviews in writing for every HNW and UHNW family on file; more than a hundred coordinated touchpoints with referring professionals in both jurisdictions; eighteen joint memoranda co-authored with outside Canadian and U.S. tax, legal, or M&A counsel.

The metric that matters — whether the architecture held when the year asked it to — is the one that will not appear in any league table. We mention it here because, for a firm that does not market, the absence of motion is the report.

II · GenerationsCapital is moving downward, and the structures that carried it up are not the structures that carry it down.

A meaningful share of the HNW and UHNW families we serve — in Canada, in the United States, and across both — are now in, or approaching, the chapter in which capital begins to move from the principal generation to the next. The mechanisms that built the wealth — operating companies, holding companies, real estate held through related entities, investment portfolios accumulated over decades — were assembled to compound under one set of hands. The mechanisms that hand them across were, in most cases, never assembled at all.

Where the work has been done, it was done in pieces and at different times: a will drafted in one decade, a trust struck in another, a shareholders’ agreement signed in a third, a life-insurance policy purchased in a fourth. Each, in isolation, may be sound. Together, in 2026, they often pull against one another — and the family is the one who pays the cost when they do.

The architecture this chapter requires is a single coordinated review, sequenced across years rather than weeks. It is not a one-time exercise. It is a posture the firm holds on the family’s behalf, returning to it as the family changes shape.

III · BordersAffairs that begin in one country no longer end there.

A growing share of Canadian HNW and UHNW families now have meaningful exposure on the other side of the border — children studying or working in the United States, real estate held in Florida or Arizona, operating subsidiaries serving U.S. customers, trusts settled with U.S. beneficiaries. The mirror is equally true: U.S. families with Canadian inheritances, dual citizens with corporate interests in both jurisdictions, U.S. retirees moving north with portfolios built south, and U.S. principals advised on Canadian-side estate exposure they did not know they had.

Each of these arrangements is workable. Each, on its own, is well understood by competent counsel. The difficulty is that each requires its own jurisdiction’s specialist — and a family that adds one without coordinating with the other will, in time, find that the two pieces of advice were sound on their own and incompatible together.

The architecture this chapter requires is a single point of coordination across both jurisdictions, with named counsel in each. It is the difference between filing returns in two countries and being structured for two countries. The firm holds that point of coordination on the family’s behalf, with U.S. counsel introduced and retained where the file warrants.

IV · Tax & postureTax administrations are watching more closely, and asking more questions, than they did a decade ago.

The posture of tax administrations on both sides of the border — CRA in Canada, the IRS in the United States — has shifted. Disclosure obligations have widened. The interpretation of established planning techniques has narrowed. Where, ten years ago, a structure could be assembled and left alone, today it requires periodic review by counsel in the relevant jurisdiction who knows it from the inside.

This is not a call to defensive planning. It is a call to current planning. The structures that were sound when struck remain available, in most cases, to families who maintain them with care. The cost is paid by families who do not — and who discover, often during a transition that cannot be paused, that an instrument they relied on is no longer fit for the use they intended.

The architecture this chapter requires is a standing relationship with counsel who reviews the structure continuously — not on the family’s initiative alone, but on the firm’s. The posture is preventative.

V · The architectureEach chapter, its own build. One mandate, end to end.

The Senatus practice is built on the conviction that each chapter of a family’s affairs — HNW or UHNW, in Canada or the United States — requires its own architecture, and that no single advisor, however able, can be the person who holds them all in mind at once. That is the firm’s role. The mandate is to coordinate the specialists already on the family’s file, and the specialists on ours, into a single structure that does what the family asks of it.

For the HNW and UHNW families we serve in 2026, the work is concentrated in three places. First, the architecture for the transfer of capital between generations — the wills, trusts, shareholders’ agreements, insurance policies, and corporate structures, brought into one coordinated plan, sequenced across the years the family has. Second, the architecture for affairs across borders — coordination of Canadian and U.S. counsel under one mandate, with named specialists on each side. Third, the standing relationship with tax counsel who reviews the structure continuously, not only when an event compels it.

The work is not glamorous. It is, often, quiet. But it is the work that, properly done, allows a family to carry its wealth across the chapters of its life without paying — in tax, in coordination, in distress — the cost of having had to assemble the architecture in haste.

To the families who have entrusted the firm with the architecture beneath their wealth: the work continues, on the cadence we set together, with the discipline we have always held it in. To the professionals who have introduced families to the bench: the relationships we have built with you are, and will remain, the firm’s most considered asset. To the readers of this letter who do not yet know the firm: when a client’s position has outgrown the room you are holding it in, write directly. The reading is on us.

VI · Critical questionsSix questions, before the next conversation.

Three for the principal of an HNW or UHNW family. Three for the professional advisor called to serve them at the highest level. The questions are simple. The answers, in our experience, are not. Each will, in time, become its own essay in Perspectives.

If any of these questions has named a position you are sitting with — on either side of the table — the firm reads the inquiry directly. The reply comes from a senior principal.

With the considered care the work asks of us all,