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Built in 2011, on one uncomfortable lesson.
The lesson
Our founders spent 2008 and 2009 inside two large institutions, watching clients discover — mid-crisis — what their advisers were actually paid to do. The commissions survived the crash better than the portfolios did.
Meridian opened in 2011 with a contract nobody in the building had seen before: one flat fee, zero commissions, custody permanently independent, every recommendation explainable to a regulator or a teenager. Fifteen years later the contract is unchanged — and the teenagers from the early family meetings are becoming clients themselves.
How the office runs
Small, senior, slow to hire.
Every client knows every desk
You are not assigned a junior. The person who builds your plan sits in your annual meeting, and the Tax desk knows your file before February, not during it.
Response time — 1 business day
Growth is capped on purpose
The office takes on at most twenty new families a year. When the book is full, the waitlist is real — we would rather say "next quarter" than dilute the desks.
Current waitlist — ask
Everything is auditable
Fees in dollars on every statement. Rebalances logged with their rule. The February tax letter scores our own work against our own fee. If a year goes badly, you will read it from us first, plainly.
Bad years — reported plainly
Fifteen years, on one line.
The contract
Two founders, eleven clients, one flat-fee contract the compliance lawyer called "commercially naive." The lawyer is now a client.
The Tax desk
The February verdict letter begins: our tax work, scored against our own fee, published to every client. It has won 9 of 11 years since.
Geneva
A second desk for cross-border families — the US/Swiss/EU triangle that big institutions handle badly and bill beautifully.
$1bn advised
Crossed quietly on a Tuesday. The office marked it by hiring its fourteenth person and declining its fifteenth.