The international offshore sector is entering a different stage of development.
For much of the past two decades, international policy towards offshore financial centres has concentrated on increasing transparency, expanding beneficial ownership requirements and improving the exchange of financial information between tax authorities.
The OECD Global Forum’s work in 2026 suggests that this process is producing a more standardised global framework rather than the disappearance of international financial centres.
Since 2016, 135 jurisdictions have completed full second-round reviews under the Global Forum’s standard for transparency and exchange of information on request. As of July 2026, 91% were rated either Compliant or Largely Compliant, with 6% rated Partially Compliant and 3% Non-Compliant.
That is significant because the jurisdictions being assessed are not limited to traditional offshore centres. The Global Forum’s current enhanced monitoring programme includes financial centres and major economies ranging from Luxembourg, Singapore and the Isle of Man to France, Japan, the United States, the Cayman Islands and Saint Kitts and Nevis.
The result is a financial system in which the broad expectations around ownership information, accounting records, banking information and cross-border tax cooperation are becoming increasingly consistent.
For offshore trusts, this may prove to be an important development.
Rather than making international trust structures obsolete, greater regulatory convergence could make it easier to distinguish professionally administered trusts from structures that depended primarily on opacity.
The Global Forum is creating a common transparency baseline
The Global Forum’s Exchange of Information on Request, or EOIR, standard is concerned primarily with whether relevant information exists and whether tax authorities can obtain and exchange that information when legitimately required.
It covers areas including legal and beneficial ownership information, accounting records, banking information and the practical operation of information exchange.
The Global Forum’s June 2026 enhanced monitoring report shows how extensive this process has become. The first 39 jurisdictions covered by the new monitoring framework had received 217 recommendations arising from previous reviews. By June, 69 recommendations were considered provisionally addressed and another 111 — just over half — were in the process of being addressed.
This is important because the monitoring process is no longer concerned only with whether a jurisdiction has legislation on its books. Increasing attention is being given to whether those rules operate effectively in practice.
A country may introduce beneficial ownership legislation, for example, but regulators must also demonstrate that information is being collected, maintained and supervised appropriately.
This creates a progressively higher minimum standard for participation in international finance.
It also makes the simple division between “onshore” and “offshore” increasingly unhelpful.
Large economies and smaller international financial centres are being assessed against substantially the same transparency principles. The more meaningful distinctions are becoming the quality of local legislation, the effectiveness of regulation, the standard of professional administration and the particular legal advantages a jurisdiction offers.
The Cook Islands provides a useful example
The Cook Islands’ July 2026 peer review illustrates this transition particularly well.
The jurisdiction joined the Global Forum in 2009 and has now completed its second review of the practical implementation of the EOIR standard.
The Cook Islands retained its overall Largely Compliant rating.
The Global Forum noted that the jurisdiction had made improvements to its transparency framework, including measures intended to strengthen the availability of legal and beneficial ownership information under both company law and its anti-money laundering framework.
It also referred to robust supervision of the international financial sector and concluded that the Cook Islands was equipped to satisfy information requests concerning that sector. Improvements were additionally recorded in the quality and timeliness of responses to requests from international exchange partners.
The review was not an unqualified endorsement. Further improvements were recommended in areas including supervision, enforcement and the availability of ownership, identity and accounting information in all relevant cases.
That balance is useful when considering the future of the jurisdiction.
The Cook Islands has historically been associated with specialist international trust legislation, particularly in the field of prospective asset protection. Its position today increasingly combines that specialist legal framework with a regulatory environment operating within international transparency standards.
The Global Forum does not assess the strength of Cook Islands asset-protection legislation, nor does a Largely Compliant rating provide any assurance about the effectiveness of a particular trust.
What the review does demonstrate is that specialist trust legislation and participation in international tax transparency arrangements can exist in the same jurisdiction.
For clients considering a Cook Islands Trust, those are two separate but increasingly relevant parts of the jurisdictional assessment.
Transparency changes disclosure, not the legal function of a trust
Greater financial transparency changes what information may need to be recorded, reported or exchanged with relevant authorities. It does not, by itself, remove the legal functions for which trusts are commonly established.
An offshore trust is a legal arrangement under which a trustee holds and administers assets in accordance with the trust deed and the law of the governing jurisdiction. Depending on the structure and the client’s circumstances, this can provide a framework for long-term family wealth ownership, succession planning, intergenerational continuity, estate planning and prospective asset protection.
These objectives do not depend on a trust being invisible to tax authorities or financial institutions. A properly administered trust can be subject to beneficial ownership requirements, customer due diligence and international information exchange while continuing to operate according to the trust law under which it was established.
This distinction is becoming more important as transparency standards become more consistent internationally.
The quality of the underlying structure matters more than confidentiality alone. Professional advisers and private clients can increasingly assess an offshore trust on familiar criteria: the governing law, the quality and independence of the trustee, the powers retained by the settlor, the ownership and location of underlying assets, and the tax and reporting obligations that apply to the relevant parties.
For established trust jurisdictions, this may ultimately improve the way offshore trusts are perceived.
A jurisdiction such as the Cook Islands can increasingly be evaluated as a combination of specialist legislation, regulated professional administration and participation in recognised international transparency standards.
That provides a more durable basis for the use of an international trust than a model based primarily on financial secrecy.
Better transparency may improve the institutional view of offshore trusts
The reputational change is potentially as important as the regulatory one.
Offshore trusts have historically been grouped together with a much broader range of offshore activity. As transparency requirements have expanded, the distinction between compliant wealth planning and undisclosed ownership has become clearer.
Professional trust planning increasingly involves documented beneficial ownership, source-of-funds enquiries, tax reporting where applicable, regulated trustees and due diligence by banks and investment custodians.
For advisers, banks and families, this creates a structure that is easier to evaluate on its legal and commercial merits.
An international trust does not need to be outside the regulated financial system to provide a different governing law, trustee relationship or succession framework.
In fact, the longer-term development of the sector may depend on the opposite: offshore trust jurisdictions being sufficiently integrated into international compliance systems that their legal advantages can be assessed independently from concerns about financial opacity.
The Cook Islands’ latest Global Forum review is relevant in precisely this context.
It does not change the jurisdiction’s trust law. It provides additional evidence that the international financial services sector surrounding that law operates within an increasingly recognised transparency framework.
The global backdrop is also becoming more favourable to trust planning
Regulatory development is occurring at the same time as a significant increase in the amount and complexity of private wealth internationally.
Capgemini’s 2026 World Wealth Report found that global high-net-worth individual wealth increased by 8.7% during 2025 to a record USD 98.3 trillion. The global HNWI population grew by almost two million people to 25.3 million, while the ultra-high-net-worth population increased by 9.4%.
More wealth does not automatically mean more offshore trusts. But it increases the number of families confronting the issues that trusts are commonly used to address.
Those issues are themselves becoming more international.
Private clients may have businesses in one country, investments in several others, children living abroad, multiple residences and assets held across different banking and custody systems.
As family wealth becomes more geographically dispersed, the question of how that wealth should be owned and governed across generations becomes more complex.
UBS’s 2026 Global Family Office Report provides some useful context. Its survey covered 307 family offices across more than 30 markets, with average family net worth of USD 2.7 billion. For the first time, 60% planned changes to strategic asset allocation over the following 12 months, with diversification across assets, currencies and regions forming an important part of the response to geopolitical and economic uncertainty.
At the same time, succession planning remains incomplete. Only 35% of the family offices surveyed had a defined succession plan for the family office itself, while only 27% had a structured process for preparing the next generation for future roles.
These are investment and governance statistics rather than measures of trust formation, but they point to conditions in which trust structures become increasingly relevant.
The more international a family’s assets become, and the greater the number of generations involved, the stronger the need for a coherent ownership and succession framework.
There are early indications of broader trust adoption
Reliable global data on the total number of offshore trusts is limited, so claims of a universal surge in offshore trust formation should be treated cautiously.
There are, however, indications that international trusts are reaching markets and client groups beyond their traditional base.
A recent example comes from the Cook Islands itself.
In June 2026, Cook Islands Finance reported on the ten-year development of Metis Global’s Cook Islands trust business. According to the organisation, Metis has grown to more than 30,000 clients, with annual regular contributions exceeding USD 200 million. Its principal markets are in North-east Asia, with further expansion underway across South-east Asia.
This is the experience of one provider and should not be treated as evidence of industry-wide growth at the same rate.
It is nevertheless relevant because it demonstrates that Cook Islands trust structures are being used in markets where international trusts historically had lower levels of familiarity.
The development also reflects a wider shift in how trusts are positioned. Trust planning is not necessarily confined to an ultra-high-net-worth family transferring a single large pool of assets. Different trust models can serve different segments of the international private-client market.
If that trend continues, the future market for international trusts may be significantly broader than the traditional offshore industry.
Regulation could support adoption rather than restrict it
At first glance, increasing regulation appears likely to make offshore structures less attractive. There are certainly additional compliance costs, reporting requirements and administrative obligations.
For well-established jurisdictions, however, those requirements may also remove one of the historic barriers to wider adoption.
Private clients usually do not evaluate an offshore structure in isolation. Their lawyers, accountants, banks, investment managers and family-office professionals may all need to understand or interact with it.
The credibility of the jurisdiction therefore matters.
A trust jurisdiction with distinctive legislation but weak administration can create practical difficulties. Equally, a highly regulated jurisdiction with no useful legal framework may offer little reason for a client to establish a trust there.
The stronger proposition is the combination of both.
For the Cook Islands, that increasingly means its value can be considered across several dimensions: specialist trust legislation, professional trustee infrastructure, regulatory supervision and participation in international information exchange.
This is relevant to prospective asset protection in particular.
The rationale for using a Cook Islands Trust should be based primarily on the jurisdiction’s trust law and how that law interacts with a client’s circumstances. The fact that the jurisdiction also operates within a recognised transparency framework may make that proposition easier for professional advisers and financial institutions to assess.
Nevis is progressing within the same international framework
The trend is not limited to the Cook Islands.
Saint Kitts and Nevis was one of the 14 jurisdictions added to the Global Forum’s enhanced monitoring report in June 2026.
Its monitoring report considered five recommendations arising from its previous peer review. Four were assessed as being in the process of being addressed, while one relating to banking information was considered provisionally addressed, subject to detailed validation, following legislative changes.
The report also recorded changes requiring beneficial ownership information for companies and partnerships to be submitted to the relevant registrar, while identifying areas where further evidence of implementation, supervision and enforcement is required.
Again, this should not be presented as an assessment of Nevis trust or company law. The Global Forum is concerned with transparency and information exchange.
It does, however, demonstrate that Nevis is subject to the same broader process of regulatory development affecting international financial centres worldwide.
That is relevant for clients considering either a Nevis Trust or a Nevis company.
The jurisdictions that remain important to international structuring over the coming decade are likely to be those capable of maintaining useful specialist legislation while continuing to meet evolving international regulatory standards.
Trusts and companies increasingly need to be considered together
The same regulatory transition is taking place in the international company sector.
Beneficial ownership reporting and accounting requirements do not remove the commercial purpose of an international company. They change the administrative environment surrounding it.
An offshore company can still be used for legitimate purposes such as holding investments, conducting international business or acting as an underlying entity within a wider wealth structure.
In some cases, an international trust may own an underlying Cook Islands company or Nevis company.
The trust and company then perform different functions.
The trust can provide the long-term ownership and succession framework, while the company provides a corporate vehicle through which particular investments or business assets are held.
There is no advantage in adding entities unnecessarily. Every layer introduces cost, administration and potential reporting obligations.
Where there is a genuine purpose, however, trust and corporate structures can be designed together rather than treated as unrelated products.
This is another area where stronger transparency standards may improve rather than diminish the quality of offshore planning. Structures increasingly need to have a clear rationale that can be explained to trustees, banks, advisers and relevant authorities.
The offshore market is becoming more selective
The longer-term consequence of global transparency may therefore be consolidation rather than elimination.
International standards increase the cost of operating a credible financial centre.
Regulators require resources. Licensed service providers need compliance systems. Beneficial ownership and accounting information must be maintained. International requests for information need to be processed accurately and on time.
Jurisdictions unable or unwilling to maintain those standards may become less attractive to internationally mobile private clients and their advisers.
Established centres that can meet them while retaining distinctive legislation could benefit.
This creates a different basis for competition between offshore jurisdictions.
Confidentiality will remain relevant within the limits permitted by law, particularly in relation to information that is not legitimately public. But it is unlikely to be the primary differentiator.
The more important factors are likely to be the quality of the law, the strength of professional administration, regulatory credibility, banking compatibility and the practical ability of the structure to meet the client’s objectives.
A more mature market could mean a larger market
There is a reasonable case that the offshore trust market could expand as it becomes more institutional rather than contract.
The underlying drivers are substantial.
Global private wealth is increasing. Families and investment portfolios are becoming more international. Geographic and political risk are receiving greater attention. Significant numbers of wealthy families have not completed succession planning, while trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations over the coming decades.
At the same time, international trust jurisdictions are becoming more integrated into global regulatory systems.
Those trends do not guarantee increased trust formation, and there is no comprehensive global dataset showing precisely how quickly offshore trust adoption is changing.
They do, however, broaden the potential use case.
A compliant international trust can increasingly be considered alongside domestic trusts, family investment companies, foundations and other wealth-planning structures rather than being treated as a separate category defined primarily by secrecy.
For jurisdictions such as the Cook Islands, that could be particularly important.
Its future market may include not only clients specifically seeking prospective asset protection, but also internationally mobile entrepreneurs, multi-jurisdictional families and professional advisers looking for a long-term ownership framework with specialist trust legislation behind it.
What the 2026 reviews tell us about the future of offshore trusts
The most important conclusion from the Global Forum’s 2026 work is not that offshore financial centres have become equivalent to major onshore economies.
Their laws, court systems, trust regimes, tax rules and financial sectors remain different.
The change is that transparency itself is becoming a less useful distinction between them.
When a large majority of reviewed jurisdictions operate within broadly comparable standards for information availability and exchange, international clients can begin to focus more closely on what actually differentiates one legal system from another.
For trust planning, that means greater emphasis on governing law, trustee quality, jurisdictional stability, succession outcomes and the treatment of future claims.
The Cook Islands’ 2026 review is therefore relevant beyond its tax transparency rating.
It shows how a jurisdiction historically known for specialist offshore trusts can continue developing within the international regulatory framework rather than outside it.
Nevis is moving through a similar process under enhanced monitoring.
Combined with rising global wealth, increasingly international family structures and growing succession needs, this points towards a more mature offshore trust industry: one in which regulatory credibility and specialist legislation increasingly operate together.
That may ultimately be supportive of broader adoption.
The future of offshore trusts is unlikely to depend on offering less transparency than the rest of the financial system. It is more likely to depend on whether established trust jurisdictions can provide a sufficiently strong legal and administrative reason for clients to choose them once transparency is treated as a normal part of international finance.
For clients considering how an international trust could form part of their long-term wealth planning, more information is available in our guide to offshore trusts and our detailed overview of the Cook Islands Trust. You can also learn more about our people or book a consultation to discuss the appropriate structure for your circumstances.
