The Year of the Family puts financial continuity on the agenda

The UAE’s Year of the Family is a prompt for institutions to look past the next quarter. The initiative emphasizes care, connection, positive values, and intergenerational continuity, and it ties into the National Family Growth Agenda 2031. For banks, the obvious starting points are savings, protection, and access to finance. But a family’s security also depends on things outside its bank account.

Begin with the household itself. Over a lifetime, a family has to plan for marriage, a home, school fees, caring for relatives, retirement, and what it eventually passes on. Savings, the right insurance, responsible credit, and a working grasp of money can soften the blow when circumstances change.

Add a business to the picture and legacy gets harder. A family enterprise might be anything from a kitchen-table operation to a major company, and ownership is only part of what gets handed down. The culture goes with it, along with how the business actually runs, who its customers are, and the judgment to make hard calls. None of that transfers by accident. It takes succession planning, governance, financial literacy, and deliberate knowledge transfer.

You have probably heard of the “three-generation rule,” the idea that family wealth rarely survives to the grandchildren. It is worth treating with caution. Harvard Business School faculty have pointed out that the claim is often misread and largely traces back to a study from decades ago. Families still need to plan for succession, and banks can help through financial-literacy programs, early conversations, and structures for passing wealth on responsibly.

The next generation also inherits the conditions it grows up in. According to UNICEF, climate-related and environmental pressures can disrupt access to nutritious food and safe water, raise disease risks, damage homes, and weaken the healthcare and education systems. Children, who are still developing and depend on the adults around them, are the most exposed.

Financing resilient housing and infrastructure, water and energy efficiency, healthcare and education access, and small businesses can help families weather those pressures. At the household level, resilience is unglamorous: reliable water, a cooler home, a clinic within reach, or a business that can keep its doors open.

Taking the long view changes what counts as prosperity. Money matters, but so do trust, health, education, and confidence in the future. A family’s legacy is not only what it owns, but whether the next generation can manage it and whether the world they inherit lets them build on it.

So the question for banks is a simple one: what do our financing decisions leave behind? If they help families absorb shocks, plan further ahead, and give their children a better start, then we are doing our part.

Faisal AlShimmari, head of ESG, Mashreq