The family office is not a new concept and has a well-established place in philanthropy. Over the past 10 years, one family office, RS Group in Hong Kong, has been pioneering new ways to look at and undertake social investing, adopting a total portfolio approach to its assets, underpinned by a blended value philosophy. Annie Chen, RS Group’s founder and chair, and Ronie Mak, its managing director, talk to Philo Alto, founder of Asia Value Advisors and a member of Alliance’s editorial advisory board, and Alliance guest editor Bheki Moyo.

Philo Alto: Could you introduce yourselves. Bheki, do you want to start?

Bheki Moyo: I am based in South Africa, at the Centre on African Philanthropy and Social Investment, at the Wits Business School in Johannesburg. We’re using the centre to develop and produce as much research material as possible, especially material produced in Africa by Africans and we’re turning it into teaching material as well. That’s probably the biggest contribution we think we are making.

Annie Chen: I am the principal of a Hong Kong-based family office. There is a philanthropic tradition in my family, but I am also motivated by a certain guilt about having inherited significant wealth from my parents. I feel that giving back, or the wise use of assets for the public good is very important, particularly in a world where there is so much inequality. I didn’t want to be limited by philanthropy, though, which is a term I don’t particularly like anyway, so we started thinking about more impactful ways of using our resources. We attended and learned from a lot of conferences where people talked about impact investing, we also worked with advisers like Jed Emerson, and we saw that impact investing and similar approaches are another way of utilising capital. So, very early on, we embraced a total portfolio approach, which simply means that we don’t make money on the one hand and then give it away on the other. We try to understand all of these actions as a way of creating impact.