# Private Trust Company (PTC): Family Trust Company and Control > What is a PTC, why families create their own trust company, how shares are held by purpose trust, and exemption conditions in Singapore, Cayman Islands, and BVI. Author: Мария Плотникова — юрист, Family Office (https://wiki.private.law/authors/plotnikova) Last modified: 2026-07-05T08:33:00.000Z Canonical: https://wiki.private.law/en/ptc Topics: structures Jurisdictions: global Semantic tags: company --- ## Origins > 🔗 **Related** > [family office](https://wiki.private.law/en/family-office) · [succession](https://wiki.private.law/en/succession-planning) Families have always wanted a trusted insider, rather than a distant institution, to hold their wealth, and the PTC turns that instinct into a formal structure. It became a mainstream tool once offshore centres wrote dedicated rules for it — Singapore's Trust Companies Act in 2005, the BVI's exemption regime in 2007, the Cayman Private Trust Companies Regulations in 2008, with Jersey, Guernsey and others following. Today a PTC is a standard building block in family office and succession planning for substantial estates. ## Concept A Private Trust Company (PTC) is a company formed to act as trustee for the trusts of a single family. Rather than hand assets to an outside professional trustee, the family incorporates its own trust company and staffs its board with people it trusts — family members, the family's lawyer, a long-standing investment adviser. The trust keeps its ordinary legal form; what changes is that the trustee is now an entity the family itself controls. ## Why It's Needed With a classic trust, the trustee is an outside institution — a bank or a licensed trust company. For a family that runs an operating business or holds a concentrated portfolio, that creates friction: an institutional trustee is risk-averse, slow to approve unusual transactions, and rarely understands the family's assets the way the family does. It may even decline to hold certain assets at all. A PTC removes that friction: it serves only its own family, so it can take informed commercial decisions quickly, and in most offshore jurisdictions it is exempt from the trust licence an institutional trustee must hold. The trade-off is that the family, not a bank, now carries the trustee's duties. ## Who Owns the PTC > 🔗 **Related** > [private foundation](https://wiki.private.law/en/private-foundations) A PTC should have no individual owner-beneficiary, because that person's death would pull the company into their estate and expose it to inheritance tax and forced-heirship claims. Its shares are therefore usually held by a non-charitable purpose trust — a trust with no beneficiaries whose only object is to hold the PTC — or, in civil-law planning, by a private foundation. The PTC then belongs to no one in particular: an "orphan" entity that survives each generation without shares passing by inheritance. What matters is who controls it — fixed in its constitution and in the trust or foundation above it — not who owns it. ## Jurisdictions > 🔗 **Related** > [trustee](https://wiki.private.law/en/trustee) The mechanics differ by jurisdiction. In Singapore a PTC is exempt from licensing under the [Trust Companies Act 2005](https://www.mas.gov.sg/regulation/acts/trust-companies-act), provided it acts only for connected persons, does not offer trust services to the public, and engages a licensed trust company to run its administration and AML/CFT checks (regulation 4 of the [Trust Companies (Exemption) Regulations](https://www.mas.gov.sg/regulation/regulations/trust-companies-exemption-regulations)). In the Cayman Islands the PTC registers with CIMA under the Private Trust Companies Regulations, conducts only "connected trust business," keeps at least one natural-person director, and holds its records at a registered office provided by a licensed trust company; registration carries an initial CIMA fee of about CI$3,500 and an annual fee of about CI$4,000. In the BVI, the Financial Services (Exemptions) Regulations 2007 exempt a company from a trust licence where it carries on only "related" or "unremunerated" trust business — the name must end in "(PTC)", and a registered agent holding a trust licence must monitor compliance on an ongoing basis. Jersey, Guernsey, the Bahamas, Nevis and Labuan host PTCs on broadly similar terms. > ⚙️ A PTC gives the family control, and with it the trustee's duties: the board actually performs the role of trustee and answers to the beneficiaries. For that reason an independent professional director normally sits on the board, and the governance is documented so that decisions cannot later be attacked as a sham. ## Governance and the board > 🔗 **Related** > [protector](https://wiki.private.law/en/trustee-protector) The board is where a PTC succeeds or fails. A workable board blends three roles: family members who understand the assets and the family's intentions; an independent professional director who keeps decisions defensible; and the licensed administrator that handles day-to-day trust work. Larger structures add committees — for investments, for distributions — and a protector who can veto major decisions or replace directors. The family's wishes are set down in a family charter and in the trust deeds, so the board exercises real, documented judgement rather than rubber-stamping requests. > 💡 The classic mistake is a board that does whatever the founder asks. A trustee that never exercises independent judgement invites the argument that the trust is a sham and the assets never truly left the founder — the very risk a PTC exists to manage. ## When a PTC makes sense > 🔗 **Related** > [holding structure](https://wiki.private.law/en/holding-structures) A PTC carries fixed running costs: incorporation, an independent director, the licensed administrator, a registered office, annual regulator fees and compliance or audit reviews. These are much the same whether the structure holds €20 million or €500 million, so a PTC tends to pay off only above a certain scale — several trusts, an operating business or assets an institutional trustee would hesitate to hold, and a family that means to keep the structure for decades. Below that, a professional trustee or a single trust is usually the better answer. In practice a PTC often sits on top of a wider holding structure that owns the underlying companies and investments. ## Transparency and Compliance > 🔗 **Related** > [Trusts (Singapore)](https://wiki.private.law/en/trust-singapore) · [Family office](https://wiki.private.law/en/family-office) · [Private Foundations](https://wiki.private.law/en/private-foundations) · [Asset protection trusts](https://wiki.private.law/en/asset-protection-trusts) · [Succession planning](https://wiki.private.law/en/succession-planning) · [Trustee](https://wiki.private.law/en/trustee) · [Holding structures](https://wiki.private.law/en/holding-structures) · [CRS](https://wiki.private.law/en/crs-overview) · [economic substance](https://wiki.private.law/en/economic-substance) · [Trustee and protector](https://wiki.private.law/en/trustee-protector) · [Trust types](https://wiki.private.law/en/trust-types) · [Family charter](https://wiki.private.law/en/family-charter) > 🔗 **Related** > Trusts (Singapore) · Family office · Private Foundations · Asset protection trusts · Succession planning · Trustee · Holding structures A PTC does not take the structure out of the reporting system. The family trusts it administers are usually treated as Financial Institutions under the CRS, which from 2026 runs in its expanded "CRS 2.0" form alongside the new Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) — so controlling persons, and crypto holdings, are reported automatically. Offshore jurisdictions also keep beneficial-ownership registers and apply economic substance rules, while the licensed administrator engaged by the PTC runs the AML and due-diligence checks. Exemption from a trust licence is not exemption from compliance. > 🍓 A PTC earns its keep where family capital is large and complex and where control, speed of decision-making and continuity across generations genuinely matter. For a single, straightforward trust, hiring a professional trustee is simpler and cheaper. This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute individual advice.