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This survey was inspired by a series of interviews with thought leaders from the asset management, family office, private equity and accounting spaces. When we discussed major trends, what came up over and over again was the acceleration of the diversification into alternative or illiquid assets such as real- estate, infrastructure, private equity, hedge funds or private debt, potentially across multiple geographies. This is driving the widespread recognition of the need to protect your company through not only more legal entities but also more complex legal structures. Previously, this was the preserve of large or sophisticated firms. What we saw as a major trend was the shift to this strategy even by modestly sized firms. Lawyers, tax accounts and auditors agree that the effective utilization of this strategy is fundamental to the protection of assets, acquisition of assets and the sale of assets. This increase in complexity is happening hand-in-hand with the shift from the CFO being a historian, documenting what has happened in the last 3 months, from a financial perspective, to owning the company playbook to drive what happens in the future. A modern CFO has access to more data than anybody else in the organization. The need for faster, data driven decisions, even when the underlying entity structure is more complex, is putting the CFO in a unique position to optimize sales, marketing funnels, contracts, and partnerships. The goal of this survey was to investigate the use of multi-entity structures across multiple verticals examining: Executive Summary The number of entities used How the number of entities used varies by vertical Does the increase in both the number of entities and complexity of the structure force every CFO into an overworked historian struggling with QuickBooks or a legacy system How long does it take to close the books How does this vary by vertical What is the average time to consolidate by entity

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