Crédit Agricole Suisse Conseil, a 100% subsidiary of Crédit Agricole Suisse, is a company dedicated to international estate and tax planning. Our role is to ensure the protection of your wealth and to optimise its transmission through the family from one generation to the next.

The complexity and diversity of the rules applied by each country and the special circumstances of modern families (geographically dispersed, owning assets abroad, etc.), mean that it is necessary to have recourse to an estate planning service.

Our experts are able to offer you a strategy, which in complete discretion and in full compliance with the law, enables you to take advantage of the rules rather than simply suffering from them. Based in Geneva, Zurich and Lugano, our dedicated team of 25 professionals is at your service.

The first task of our advisers is to analyse your particular circumstances. Drawing on their expert knowledge of private law (inheritance, gifting, matrimonial property and company laws, etc.) and tax law (income, capital gains, inheritance, gift law and wealth taxes, etc.), they will design and propose a tailor-made solution to optimise your situation.

This could involve a change in your main place of residence, the subscription to a life insurance policy or the establishment of one or more legal entities such as a company, a family trust or a family foundation.

Once the optimal solution has been identified with you, our experts will guide you along each step of the way. We can also assist with the management of your chosen entity and remain available to provide advice as and when the need arises.

Our legal and fiscal analysis may lead to the establishment of various types of legal entities:

• • a holding company can take advantage of the network of double taxation agreements that have been concluded between different countries
  • the acquisition of real estate by a company as opposed to it being owned in person, may, under international private law, change the succession law applicable to the assets, and in tax law, the State competent to tax this part of the estate
  • a company may also serve as an efficient means of holding securities and liquid assets.
• A family trust is an instrument best suited to preserving wealth within a family over several generations. The settlor transfers the ownership of the property (e.g. shares in a family company, bank assets and the like) to a trustee who becomes the legal owner. The trustee then protects and manages the estate so that it can be transmitted at some time in the future to the equitable owners, the beneficiaries designated by the settlor.
  
  The family trust, like the family foundation, avoids the problem of significant wealth being placed at the immediate disposal of persons too young for such a responsibility. Instead, the trustee or the foundation enables the passing on of the assets to be deferred until the beneficiaries reach an age deemed appropriate by the settlor, even if he has in the meantime passed away.
• A life insurance policy is another means of transferring an asset from one generation to the next through a third party, in this case, the life insurance company. While the life insurance policy may be less flexible than the family trust or the family foundation, it can in certain circumstances provide a very favourable legal and fiscal solution.