Answers to the questions you haven’t asked yet.

By private referral, almost without exception — from a principal we already serve or a senior professional advisor who knows the firm. The first conversation is held under full confidence; nothing about it is recorded against the family until an engagement is signed. No commitment is expected on either side until fit, chemistry, and mandate are unmistakably right. Discretion is not a posture taken at the close. It is the precondition of the first meeting.

A deliberately limited number of Canadian and cross-border ultra-high-net-worth families. Most arrive through a recent liquidity event, an inter-generational transition, or the quiet recognition that their affairs have outgrown any single advisor. The roster is held small, by design. Each family is known to a senior principal personally, and the size of the practice is what permits the standard of confidence we keep.

Private Advisory is typically composed for families at twenty-five million or more in net worth, where corporate holdings, cross-border interests, and inter-generational objectives warrant coordinated counsel. The balance sheet is never the only measure. Fit, temperament, and the kind of confidence the family requires of its bench are discussed candidly in the first conversation, and never afterward in any other room.

Yes. A principal who prefers to issue instructions rather than hold a considered dialogue; a family already under the coordination of another firm; an objective the firm cannot honestly advance — each is a basis for declining. The decision is taken before the engagement begins, and the conversation that produced it never leaves the room. Discretion runs in both directions.

Yes, in most engagements. Most families arrive already well-served by capable professionals — often the same advisors who made the referral. Senatus coordinates; it does not displace. Existing counsel is treated, from the first conversation, with the same discretion as the family itself. Where a discipline is absent or under-served, specialists may be introduced from the firm’s network, only at the family’s explicit request and never as a condition of the engagement.

Under a written coordination protocol that preserves each professional’s scope and authority. Drafts circulate among the full bench under a common confidentiality understanding; decisions are recorded jointly; no specialist is instructed around another, and no information passes to anyone outside the bench without the family’s express written direction. Where a gap exists, we convene. Where redundancy exists, the conversation is candid, joint, and held with the existing professional’s full knowledge.

A single-family office warrants its infrastructure at approximately two hundred and fifty million in net worth. A multi-family office brings scale but carries product conflicts, shared allegiances, and a roster of relationships its staff move through routinely. Senatus occupies the space between: institutional coordination and full-spectrum advisory capability, without the overhead of a single-family office or the conflicts of a multi-family platform. The corollary, deliberate, is that each family’s file is held in close circle — small, senior, and accountable.

The firm’s mandate is Canadian families with cross-border interests — U.S. residency, U.S. property, U.S. operating businesses, or U.S. beneficiaries. For these families, qualified U.S. tax, estate, and investment counsel are convened under joint mandate with our Canadian practice, all working under the same confidentiality protocol. Senatus Wealth is not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, or any U.S. state securities regulator; cross-border work is consultative and coordinative rather than advisory under U.S. law. The professionals brought to the table are vetted as carefully for discretion as for technical capability.

A best-in-breed bench of senior practitioners, each carrying decades of complex UHNW experience across tax, business law, M&A, financial advisory, estate, insurance architecture, and cross-border structuring. The bench is built selectively, by long-standing relationship and reputation, and every member operates under the firm’s confidentiality protocol — the same one held by the principal partners. Senatus remains deliberately flexible and product-agnostic within the bench, so the right specialist is brought to the right matter without allegiance to a platform or distribution agreement. The result is the ultra-premium, objective, and unfailingly private advisory experience principal families and their existing advisors expect when the file outgrows any single firm.

Directly, by the families it serves — on a transparent fee or retainer basis, agreed in advance and recorded in the engagement letter. Where investment or insurance solutions are implemented through regulated entities, any additional compensation is disclosed in writing before placement. No referral fees pass between the firm and the specialists on its bench, in either direction. The economics of every engagement are visible to the family from the first conversation forward.

Fees take one or more of three forms: a flat annual retainer for advisory coordination, asset-based fees on capital under oversight, and standard insurance commissions where policies are placed. The mix is set to the engagement and disclosed before signing. Retainer ranges and worked examples are walked through privately during the initial conversation, with the family and any of their existing advisors who wish to participate.

No. To preserve objectivity over client capital, the firm neither manufactures nor manages investment product. The role held is one of investment oversight — designing the mandate, selecting and monitoring registered investment managers on the family’s behalf, and holding continuing review over the result. The absence of in-house product is the structural guarantee behind every recommendation, and the practical reason advisors on a family’s existing bench are comfortable speaking with us in confidence.

Structurally — as balance-sheet infrastructure, not as product. It funds estate liabilities at the moment they arise, underwrites continuity against early death or incapacity, and creates liquidity on the family’s timing rather than the market’s. The decision is always resolved in joint conference with tax and legal counsel under a shared confidentiality protocol; it is never the first answer to a planning question, and rarely the last. Underwriting itself is conducted with the same discretion the rest of the file is.

Yes, selectively. Alternatives are evaluated within the family’s broader architecture — against tax position, liquidity requirements, succession objectives, and the privacy posture the family wishes to keep — rather than against a benchmark or peer-group allocation. Access to the asset class is not the question; fit within the structure, including its disclosure footprint, is.

Senatus Wealth is privately owned. There is no parent institution, no external platform, and no distribution agreement conditioning which instruments or counsel may be recommended. Ownership composition is disclosed to every principal family before engagement. Independence is what permits the firm to keep the standard of discretion it does — and to refuse, when the right answer is to refuse.

Senatus operates within Canadian regulatory frameworks for investment advisory and insurance; registrations are set out in writing in the engagement letter. Client investment capital is custodied at independent third-party institutions — never at the firm. Statements of position flow directly from the custodian, which is the custodian of record for every account. The architecture is deliberate: the firm sees what the family directs it to see, and capital itself sits beyond the firm’s reach by structural design.

The central operating artifact of the mandate. A written document — reviewed annually with the family — recording objectives, governance, investment parameters, tax position, succession protocols, confidentiality preferences, and the standards to which every advisor is held. It is held under encryption at the firm and circulated only to professionals named on the family’s authorisation. It outlasts any individual advisor and is the reference document for every future professional introduced into the relationship. A mandate without a Family Policy Statement is a collection of transactions; with one, it is an institution.

The scope of coordination. The disciplines held. The fee architecture in its concrete form. The conflict-handling and reporting protocols. The confidentiality regime — written, mutual, and binding on every member of the bench. The continuity provisions that govern transition of primary counsel. The document is circulated in draft and reviewed with existing advisors before it is signed; nothing is hidden inside it, and nothing is left to oral understanding.

Not as a deadline, but as a structural decision point. For every trust within the family’s architecture, we model the twenty-one-year horizon from the inception of the engagement — identifying distributions, rollovers, restructurings, or additions that should be sequenced years in advance rather than in the final quarter before the anniversary. The schedule is held privately at the firm and reviewed at each annual session. The rule is treated as a planning instrument, not a surprise.

The architecture is held at the firm, not at any individual advisor. Mandate documentation, family governance materials, and specialist relationships sit at the firm level, under encryption and access logged. A written continuity protocol governs transition of primary counsel in the event of incapacity, retirement, or departure — coordinated through the firm’s principal partners and the family’s named successor contacts. Confidentiality survives the personnel; the file does not move because the principal advising it does. The specific protocol for each family is provided at engagement.

A formal review is held no less than semi-annually; the annual review is a longer working session at which the Family Policy Statement is revisited in confidence with the family. Position reporting is delivered quarterly from the custodian, with an engagement-level dashboard available on request and credentialed to named users only. Ad-hoc meetings are held as matters arise; no principal waits for a cadence when the matter does not wait. Every record of every meeting sits behind the firm’s confidentiality regime.

Discretion is the first condition of every relationship and the firm’s irreducible commitment. Client information is shared only after written consent, only with professionals explicitly engaged on the family’s behalf, and only as necessary to deliver counsel. Systems are encrypted, access is logged, and every member of the bench operates under written confidentiality undertakings to the firm and to the family. The practice is built to function as a vault — what enters is held; what leaves does so by the family’s direction, never on its own. In this work, discretion is not a value statement. It is the architecture itself.

Not in the form most firms supply. Specific client work, drafts, structures, or memoranda are never circulated — the families who entrusted them did so in confidence, and that confidence outlasts any single conversation. What is offered instead is the firm’s published thinking: the Architecture document setting out how the practice runs, the Perspectives library demonstrating how questions are reasoned, and the Quarterly Notes from the bench. In an initial conversation, illustrative scenarios — structurally accurate, anonymised, drawn from this firm’s files — are walked through directly with you and any of your existing advisors who wish to participate. The proof of the work is the work itself, viewed at the right altitude.

No. The firm does not introduce prospective principals to existing clients — the discretion our families insist upon is its own measure. Once an engagement commences, our bench is made directly available to your existing advisors. Your accountant, lawyer, or trusted counsel speaks with ours, in coordination, on the work itself. The reference is the practice, not a name on a list.