Germany is an enormous market that still offers entry room for a global wealth manager like us. It’s a complex market with a lot of accumulated wealth, so it would be difficult to break in without the infrastructure and relationships that Kontora has built over the past 20 years. The way they service and invest on behalf of families fits our ethos very well. By connecting AlTi’s global scale and capabilities, particularly in alternatives and impact investing, we’re enabling the next chapter of Kontora’s growth story.

We are making good progress with the integration, and we are already seeing commercial momentum take hold. Since the announcement earlier this year, Kontora has secured two major client mandates, a single-family office and an entrepreneurial family, and is actively engaged with several high potential prospects. These opportunities are being driven by enhanced international reach, cross-border capabilities, and access to impact-focused solutions. It is a clear sign that our integration is resonating in the market and opening the door for meaningful long-term growth opportunities.

This certainly is an unusual time, with long-standing international partnerships being challenged. Heightened political volatility is an issue irrespective of where you operate today. In wealth management, it’s our job to help families see through that noise. We have to be well-informed politically, but agnostic. Our clients want to know how we are protecting them against trade tensions. This is where the quality of good advisory stands out in particular. However, our clients are investing with very long time horizons and less concerned with current market swings than with the prosperity of the generations that follow them.  

When the Federal Reserve started to hike rates after years of extremely loose policy in 2022, that went much better than we could have expected. Now, you have the fundamental cost of expanding government debt at rates that are still elevated. The administration in Washington has to keep a very delicate balance between stimulating the economy and risking fiscal stability. These risks bring volatility, but we have always been careful to have a sound measure of liquidity in our portfolios so we can buy up assets that are undervalued and oversold. These are the times when active portfolio strategies and owning high quality risk assets produce a real benefit.

Exactly, and the Great Wealth Transfer is a global phenomenon, from the US to the Middle East and China. In Germany, society is aging fast, and family businesses are changing control rapidly. Families need to navigate this transition and make hard decisions about the extreme wealth they have built up over the past decades. That entails an evaluation of complex tax components, governance structures and business strategies, which opens up large organic growth potential for us. Families realize that working with a wealth manager that has organized multiple transitions successfully is beneficial to them. Even if the tax structure in different jurisdictions can vary, there are dynamics that they share which can be helpful in decision making. .

The families we work with are very interested in private markets, which is where we see a lot of growth potential and increasingly sophisticated capital solutions. One of these is the private debt program we have launched in cooperation with Allianz, through which our clients can invest into secondaries and co-investments alongside the world’s largest insurer. These investment solutions are extraordinarily fee-competitive as we invest with one of the leading buyers in the private credit secondaries market. Through our acquisition of Kontora, we have now made this strategy available to their clients in the Germany and Austria

It’s a fair comment to make that private credit has yet to go through a harsh negative cycle while at the same time taking over many responsibilities since 2008 once fulfilled by traditional banking intermediaries. When that negative cycle eventually arrives, our strategy focused on the secondaries market and our co-investment structure will become vital. Redemption pressures in the market will widen the discounts in that scenario – and thus the opportunities for us and our clients. In a downturn, we will act counter-cyclically and become one of the biggest buyers in the market. At the same time, we have clear risk management guidelines and would never allow our clients to put all of their eggs into one basket or asset class.

Generally, I would expect that market participants can anticipate a continued course towards less regulation during this administration. How that affects different segments of the market is speculative. Still, regulators usually react when there are more fundamental issues and challenges beyond just a challenging credit cycle. I would not be surprised if regulators were to pay closer attention to private credit three or four years from now. Any crisis in the segment is bound to be different from stress in the banking sector.

In the sense that it’s probably going to be much more company specific. By definition, private markets will remain less transparent, and less interconnected than the traditional banking sector. That’s why it’s so important for us and our clients to invest with the best firms that have enough liquidity and capital buffers as well as robust infrastructure in place.

There is no question that big asset management firms have recognised the growth opportunities in private credit and the attractiveness to clients. It’s not surprising that they would target specialised firms with an asset base of $5 to 10 billion and gain access to new strategies that way. However, that doesn’t change our approach – in fact, it might create even more places to invest. We might not have invested with a smaller fund that controls $5 billion, but when they receive backing from a much larger firm and retain their team and product, then co-signing deals with them can become much more attractive to us.

The fact that we co-invest with our clients shows that we are committed to the products we offer them. Along with Kontora we have accumulated approximately $92 billion USD in assets under management / advisement, and we want to use our scale to the benefit of our clients. Co-investing is an important tool in our strategy, through which we are aiming to bring down fees and widen access to specific opportunities in the market. A family that wants to set up its own office can use our investment platform and lower their infrastructure and transaction costs by 50% after fees.

We don’t have a directional view on cryptocurrency – we are not trying to predict price levels. But we do think it represents a very real investment and digital trend, especially for people in countries with tight capital controls or hyperinflation like Argentina that see their currency constantly devaluating. If a family wants to protect their assets against that, then there are some viable strategies to invest long and short in cryptocurrency, which will act like a digital form of gold.

No, but it’s still a young asset. So far, cryptocurrencies are volatile and used more for trading than long-term positioning, but it does have the ability to become more than that, especially due to its scarcity.

We wanted to create a permanent entity with a global scale through the listing. Going from private to public is a hard transition, and we did experience that. However, we do see great advantages as a result of our move. We now have a currency for our employees through publicly traded stock. There is broad ownership across the employee base, which means that our success is directly aligned with our people’s success. The listing also helped give us a governance structure as we expanded and integrated globally – that is an important part of how we attracted investors like Allianz. And it has become easier for us to attract talent because the listing has increased our name value. However, on the operating side, we have not changed anything about how we interact with and serve our clients.

They let one of their top people go and we hired them after the fact. 

We are very much in growth mode and looking to hire more talented leaders where we can find them. Great advisors recognise how broad our service offering and how competitive our platform is. I think many are happy to take their clients to us in order to increase their competitiveness from within the firm for years to come. On the other hand, since we engage with our clients long term, we are looking to bring in people who fit that mindset. That’s why some of our key employees have been with us for ten, fifteen or even twenty years.

I think sophisticated clients will try to look at the entire picture, but I do think that trust and other components like chemistry play a large role in our job. That’s why it’s not trivial to win over new clients from a firm where they enjoy a personal relationship with their current advisor. However, times as disruptive and volatile as these are when families make changes – either because the generation that has steered the ship is advancing in age, because they are disappointed in their current advisor or because they have recently created wealth and are looking for new strategies to invest it in.

I’m 53 years old and feel very energetic. The good thing about wealth management is that you hit your prime in your 50s and 60s, since many families like to be served and advised by people with experience under their belt. As a publicly traded company, we do have a succession plan – both for emergencies and longer term. However, I enjoy my job and still see a lot of goals I want to achieve.

We are present in Zurich and Lugano today. I do think that many $2 to 5 billion firms in the German-speaking world and their clients would benefit greatly by being part of our platform and having that opportunity to scale and gain access to new strategies, for example in private markets. Ultimately, we are in the business of acquiring talent who are committed fiduciaries of the families they work with, and if we can find people like that, I’m always open to further expansion.