DC Advisory's European Secondaries Team Has Disbanded
DC Advisory's European Secondaries Team Has Disbanded
DC Advisory's European private equity secondaries advisory practice has effectively ceased to exist, with three managing directors departing over the past year, according to The Wall Street Journal (June 15, 2026). The team's unraveling closes out what had been a deliberate multi-year build in a market that, until recently, looked like one of the more durable growth areas in private markets advisory.
The construction of that team was methodical. DC Advisory entered the GP secondaries segment in September 2022 with the hire of Michael Wieczorek as managing director, positioning the firm to advise on GP-led transactions — continuation vehicles, NAV facilities, and single-asset processes that had by then displaced LP portfolio sales as the dominant secondaries deal type by volume. The following April, Sabina Sammartino joined from Mercury as a further managing director based in London, adding LP secondaries depth to a practice that had started with a GP-led focus.
That trajectory — two senior hires in under seven months — suggested a firm with genuine conviction behind the buildout, not a tentative experiment. The dissolution of all three MD-level positions within roughly a year tells a different story.
The secondaries advisory market DC Advisory was attempting to enter is structurally crowded at the top. Evercore, Lazard, and Jefferies have dominant share in GP-led mandates, while dedicated secondaries specialists like Setter Capital and MVision compete on LP portfolio advisory. Mid-market and European-focused challengers face a client base that, when it comes to a complex continuation vehicle or a stapled primary, tends to gravitate toward advisers with a long track record of clearing deals with the same pool of secondaries buyers. Relationships with Ardian, Lexington, Coller, and the secondary arms of large alternatives managers matter enormously — and those take years to establish at institutional depth.
There is also a structural timing issue. The GP-led market that looked so attractive in 2021 and early 2022, when rate suppression was inflating NAVs and GPs were running continuation vehicles partly as liquidity management tools, looked considerably more complicated by 2024 and 2025. Rising discount rates, LP fatigue around GP-led transactions — particularly where the same manager is effectively setting a price for its own assets — and regulatory scrutiny in certain jurisdictions all compressed deal volumes and advisory fee pools. For a newer entrant without an established deal pipeline, that environment was punishing.
The departure of three managing directors rather than one or two also points to something beyond individual career decisions. When an entire practice-level team exits a firm simultaneously or in rapid succession, the most common drivers are mandate scarcity, internal resource commitments that did not materialise, or competing offers from platforms with better-established secondaries franchises. Without DC Advisory commenting on record, the specific cause is not verifiable — but the pattern is recognisable in how other mid-market banks have struggled to sustain standalone secondaries advisory units that lack either deal flow from a captive primary sponsor base or a proprietary fund to anchor client conversations.
DC Advisory itself is the European and Asian advisory arm of Daiwa Securities Group, with particular strength in mid-market M&A across France, Germany, and the UK. Its core franchise is transactional M&A advisory rather than alternatives capital markets. That parent profile may have constrained the firm's ability to compete for the kind of large, complex secondaries mandates where fee economics justify a sustained investment in senior headcount.
The secondaries advisory space will absorb these departures without much disruption — the market has no shortage of experienced practitioners cycling between platforms. For DC Advisory, the more pointed question is whether the firm pursues a rebuilt secondaries capability, integrates the function into its broader alternatives coverage, or steps back from the segment entirely. None of those outcomes is visible yet in the available record.
