Cash, Liquidity, and Treasury Management
Treasury for a family office is more like a corporate treasury than a personal cash account — and most offices treat it like the latter.
Key takeaways
- —Bank-account rationalisation is usually the first quick win.
- —Sweep arrangements and treasury laddering recover meaningful yield.
- —Counterparty diversification matters above $50M in deposits.
- —Liquidity tiers (operating / strategic / reserve) clarify deployment decisions.
Most family offices accumulate bank accounts the way they accumulate technology — incrementally, opportunistically, without an overall design. The result is twenty accounts across five banks, none of which alone is interesting enough to manage actively. Treasury rationalisation — closing redundant accounts, consolidating to two or three primary banks, putting sweep arrangements in place — is usually the cleanest early operational improvement an office can make.
Above the rationalisation, treasury becomes liquidity laddering. Operating cash for the next 90 days sits in immediately-available form. Strategic cash for the next 12 months sits in higher-yield instruments. Reserve cash for tail-risk scenarios sits at counterparties chosen for safety, not yield, with documented limits per institution. The discipline is to treat treasury as a portfolio with its own policy, not as a residual.
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