A Message from Derek
Do You Get the Sense That Something Isn't Quite Right?
You know deep down that the world financially is in a precarious position — but you're perplexed on how to prepare yourself and your family. In the space of a few years, the rules about money, movement and speech changed faster than most of us thought possible.
In 2023, it stopped being theoretical for me. My own bank accounts were frozen.
Two of them I could understand — I had changed the governance in some of my business entities, and one bank decided that meant overhauling everything rather than modifying the accounts I already had. I had to ring clients and ask them to stop paying me until it was sorted.
The third one had no reason at all. I cleared every hoop they put in front of me under the “Know Your Client” rules — sat across from my banker, signed the forms in front of her, had the other trustees identify themselves, one of them flying in from overseas to do it. The structure was frozen anyway. To this day I have never been given a definitive answer why.
During the same period my father passed away, and seven other people in my network died within three or four months. While grieving and leading my family through it, I was still on the phone to the bank. Eventually I filed a complaint with the Ombudsman, and six months into that process something occurred to me that I had never once had to think about.
“I had built everything on the assumption that access to my own money was guaranteed. It isn’t.”
There's a silver lining in every storm, and this was a genuine wake-up call. It made me realise how over-reliant and trusting we are on banks to be the custodians of our wealth — and I started looking for ways to be less dependent on any single institution holding the keys.
And now I'd like to share my findings with you…