For a long time, spreading capital across regions was treated as a form of safety. Different countries, different currencies, different cycles - the logic held that if one corner of the map wobbled, the others would hold. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 quietly retired that assumption, and family offices are still catching up to what replaced it.
The lesson, as Derek Leatherdale of geopolitical intelligence firm Sibylline frames it in a 2025 IMA article, is that exposure no longer follows a postcode. What determines your risk is not where your holdings sit but what they depend on - the commodities in their supply chains, the shipping lanes their goods move through, the rate and energy regimes their margins assume. In his words, in a globalised market, “geography is decreasingly important.”
For an allocator, that is an uncomfortable idea. You can hold assets across a dozen jurisdictions and still be, in substance, a single concentrated bet on the price of oil or the openness of one waterway.
This is no longer a fringe concern. In EY-Parthenon's 2025 survey of 1,000 global executives, 60% said geo-strategic risk had hurt their operations and supply chains, and 57% reported damage to reputation and compliance. Boards have moved accordingly: the share taking action across seven identified geostrategy areas rose from 26% in 2021 to 76% in 2025, and EY reports that 94% of the companies it reviewed increased the time and resources they put into geostrategy.
In other words, the operating businesses inside a family office's portfolio - and the fund managers allocating alongside it - are already pricing this in. An allocator who isn't is quietly running a looser standard than the assets they own.
The same research points to what actually separates the prepared from the exposed. It is not prediction; it is process. Four habits recur: standing up systems to identify and monitor risk; assessing its impact across functions and geographies and defining concrete mitigations; folding political risk into the main risk framework rather than parking it in a separate file; and feeding the findings back into how strategy and decisions are made. A practical refinement from the EY team: put a number on the qualitative, because a quantified risk is one you can actually manage.
The reason so few do this well is honest: the impacts are genuinely tangled, cutting across investments, operations and counterparties at once. That demands an interconnected internal response - and someone with the standing to convene it. The article lands on the finance function as the natural home for that role, precisely because it already sees across the whole organisation.
For a family office, that convening capacity is the missing piece more often than the analysis is. Connecting the investment book, the operating assets and the risk map into a single view is a finance job - and one a fractional CFO can hold without the cost of a permanent C-suite hire.
Geography was always a comforting map. It is simply no longer an accurate one. The exposures that matter now travel through what you own, not where you keep it - and the ones that hurt are rarely the shocks you can name, but the dependencies you never mapped.
Source: Mastering the Challenges of Geo-Strategic Risk - Ramona Dzinkowski, IMA (Institute of Management Accountants), 2025.
