How a Private Equity Advisory Startup Fell Apart: The DC Advisory Secondaries Collapse

DC Advisory's European private equity secondaries advisory practice has effectively ceased to exist. Three managing directors departed over the past year, according to The Wall Street Journal (June 15, 2026). What makes this notable is that the firm had built this team deliberately, spending roughly eighteen months recruiting senior specialists into what looked like a durable growth area in private markets advisory.

The team's construction 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. These deal types had by then displaced LP portfolio sales as the dominant secondaries business by volume. The following April, Sabina Sammartino joined from Mercury as a managing director based in London, deepening the practice's LP secondaries expertise. Two senior hires in under seven months signaled genuine commitment, not a tentative experiment.

Yet all three MD-level positions dissolved within roughly a year. That's a different story.

The secondaries advisory market is structurally stacked at the top. Evercore, Lazard, and Jefferies dominate GP-led mandates. Dedicated secondaries specialists like Setter Capital and MVision compete on LP portfolio advice. For mid-market and European-focused challengers, the barrier is high: clients typically prefer advisers with a long track record of clearing deals with the same pool of secondaries buyers. Relationships with established secondary funds — Ardian, Lexington, Coller, and the secondary arms of large alternatives managers — matter enormously, and those relationships take years to build at institutional depth.

There is also a structural timing problem. The GP-led market looked attractive in 2021 and early 2022, when suppressed interest rates were inflating fund valuations and general partners were using continuation vehicles partly as liquidity management tools. But by 2024 and 2025, the picture had shifted. Discount rates rose, LP appetite for GP-led transactions cooled — particularly deals where the same manager is effectively pricing its own assets — and regulatory pressure in some jurisdictions increased. Deal volumes and advisory fee pools compressed. For a newer entrant without an established deal pipeline, that environment was damaging.

When an entire practice-level team exits a firm simultaneously or in rapid succession, the typical causes are mandate scarcity, internal resource commitments that failed to materialize, or better offers from platforms with stronger secondaries franchises. Without DC Advisory commenting on record, the specific driver is not known. But the pattern is recognizable: 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 relationships.

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 large, complex secondaries mandates where fee economics justify sustained investment in senior talent.

The secondaries advisory space will absorb these departures without disruption — the market has no shortage of experienced practitioners moving between platforms. For DC Advisory, the sharper question is whether the firm rebuilds its secondaries capability, folds the function into its broader alternatives coverage, or exits the segment. None of those outcomes is yet visible in available reporting.