How to invest wealth are some of the most important and far-reaching decisions a family can make. An Investment Policy Statement (IPS) can help guide planning and executing an investment program. Ensuring your IPS is centered in and aligned with your family’s mission and values can help ensure your family flourishes now and in the future.

An IPS creates a framework for managing assets, serving as a strategic guide for managing an investment program over time. In our approach, centering the IPS around your family’s key aspirations can help shape an investment program that adheres to your family’s values and long-term vision.

When implemented successfully, an IPS anticipates needs and issues related to: 

  • Governance of the investment program
  • Planning for an appropriate risk-focused asset allocation
  • Implementing investments with both internal and external managers 
  • Monitoring results 
  • Managing risk across all assets
  • Reporting on a regular basis

The power of a planned course of action

Family eating marshmallows

When you implement an IPS, you set standards for accountability at every stage of an investment program’s development and implementation. The IPS, for example, can provide rules for managing distributions to meet family members’ financial needs, entrepreneurial aims or philanthropic goals—while also prioritizing the goal of sustaining and growing the family’s underlying investments on an ongoing basis.

Your IPS serves as an important guide to every entity that works on your behalf as an investor. It reinforces the obligation of advisers to offer counsel and also guides current and future generations in adhering to strategic investing policies.

Most importnantly, an IPS sets out an objective course of action to be followed during periods of market disruption when emotional or instinctive responses might otherwise provoke less prudent actions that can lead to behavioral investment mistakes.

The IPS becomes the keystone in creating a strategic decision-making process that determines how the assets are to be managed and how to appropriately size the risk underwritten in asset allocations. 

Key initial steps to enhance your family wealth

The ideal IPS is created as a partnership between the Investment Committee and your family, with decision-making ultimately agreed to by vote of the Investment Committee and officially implemented through key designated members.

Develop a set of guiding principles - In advance of crafting an IPS, it is important to engage the family across generations in establishing a set of guiding principles. A family mission statement can help articulate these principles as well as a shared vision. 

Establish an investment committee - Key to ensuring that your family’s objectives are met is creating an Investment Committee to develop the investment strategy, often in discussions with the family office and external investment advisors. The strategy is then memorialized in a well-thought-out investment policy statement.

As a comprehensive road map to guide decisions about your family’s investments and liquidity needs into the decades ahead, an investment policy statement is key to your family’s future success.

Dive deeper

For additional information, including a comprehensive checklist for creating an investment policy statement, download our whitepaper, Investment policy statements: A family-centered approach to investing family wealth. And speak with a UBS Financial Advisor about strategies for managing family wealth.

Investment Policy Statements publication thumbnail

Approval Code: 20250818-4752840 Exp: 8/18/2026

Explore more

Gain additional perspectives

Get in touch

Together, we can help you pursue what’s important

Are you a client?

Become a UBS client