The incoming heirs of dynasties prioritize financial returns over sustainable, do-good strategies just as much as the previous generation did, according to a UBS survey of 121 family offices.
“Unlike what you hear, a next generation that is meant to be very green and very altruistic and very much anti-business, is actually very pro-business,” Josef Stadler, head of the global family office unit at UBS, said in an interview. Billionaires will pass on more than $2 trillion of wealth within the next two decades, according to research by UBS and PwC. The world’s top wealth managers have been bolstering their offerings of green, sustainable and good governance investments -- known as ESG -- as studies from as recently as last year indicated that they would be more attractive to millennials taking over.