A Financial Advisory Firm's Secondaries Team Just Fell Apart. Here's Why It Matters.

DC Advisory, a European financial advisory firm, has lost its entire private equity secondaries team. Three senior leaders departed over the past year, according to The Wall Street Journal (June 15, 2026). What makes this notable is that the firm had deliberately hired these people just eighteen months earlier, betting that this business would grow.

What is secondaries advisory, anyway? Think of it this way: when a large investment fund wants to sell off an asset or restructure how it manages money, it hires advisers to help with the deal. That's secondaries advisory. DC Advisory decided in late 2022 to start offering this service. In September 2022, they hired Michael Wieczorek as a managing director. Then in April 2023, they hired Sabina Sammartino from a competitor. Two senior hires in less than a year sent a clear signal: this firm believed in this business.

Within roughly twelve months, all three leaders were gone.

The secondaries advisory market is dominated by a handful of large firms. Evercore, Lazard, and Jefferies control most of the big deals. Smaller, newer advisers struggle because clients prefer to work with firms they know and trust — firms that have done similar deals before and have relationships with the major secondary investment funds. Those relationships take years to build. DC Advisory had neither the track record nor the relationships.

The market also turned cold at exactly the wrong time. In 2021 and early 2022, the secondaries business was booming. Interest rates were low, which made investments look more valuable on paper. General partners — the managers of these big funds — were eager to restructure and refinance. By 2024 and 2025, everything had changed. Interest rates rose. Investors became skeptical of deals where fund managers were essentially pricing their own assets. Regulators in some countries started scrutinizing the business more carefully. Deal volumes dropped sharply. For a brand new entrant, that downturn was punishing.

When an entire team leaves a firm all at once or in rapid succession, it usually points to one of three things: not enough business to keep them busy, promises from senior leadership that never materialized, or better job offers from competitors with stronger businesses. Without DC Advisory commenting publicly, we don't know which it was. But the pattern shows up repeatedly in the financial services industry: smaller firms struggle to hold onto secondaries teams unless they have their own investment fund to sell deals to or a steady pipeline of business coming from inside their own organization.

DC Advisory is owned by Daiwa Securities Group, a Japanese financial giant. The firm is known for doing mergers-and-acquisitions deals in France, Germany, and the UK — not for investing in private equity funds or running their own alternatives business. That mismatch may have limited how much DC Advisory could really compete for the large, complex secondaries deals where the money is.

The secondaries business will move forward. There are plenty of experienced advisers out there, and they'll find work elsewhere. For DC Advisory, the question is simpler: Does the firm try again, fold this work into its general alternatives advisory practice, or walk away from secondaries altogether? We don't yet know the answer.