Kontora: Family Wealth Management Firm of the Year

Since its founding in 2006, Kontora has become one of the leading and largest independent multi-family offices in Germany. The Kontora team consists of 50 employees including 20 senior consultants in the areas of property, banking and mergers and acquisitions, and the corporate consultation team is responsible for over €5 billion assets under advisory.

Kontora does not offer the traditional asset management approach as this leads to conflicts of interests. Rather, Kontora works solely on a fee basis approach and is obliged to nobody but its clients.Clients can choose either a holistic advisory approach or specific financial services on a modular basis. With this approach, Kontora has providing its affiliated families with exceptional long-term investment returns. A particular benefit of Kontora is their access to paths such as institutional investor groups, club deals and private placements, which cannot be accessed through other wealth management companies.

Kontora’s infrastructure and mind-set is highly innovative. Their investment strategy is focused on continuously increasing value based on a risk profile similar to that of a pension, but with a much higher return.  Kontora is able to unite three schools of thought under one roof and enhance them. The works of Swensen/Takahashi from Yale Endowment are the basis for their resilient multi-asset architecture. When assessing direct  investments, they use the mind-set of value investing and are aware of the weaknesses of human decision making in investing and try to avoid them.

Overall, Kontora focuses on productive strategies and establishes an optimal organisational structure for the clients assets.

Based on their success to date, the Corporate LiveWire judging panel finds Kontora’s business model and investment strategy to be highly effective and beneficial to their clients, which has in part influenced their decision to honour the company with this award. By launching a new high net worth generational asset management service in Q4 2019, Kontora shows continued dedication to the interests of their clients.

The judges were further impressed by Kontora’s move to integrate asset management in an online portal and app to allow clients to manage their wealth remotely. Clients can access information on all of their assets via their mobile devises, using a highly sophisticated IT infrastructure with the highest safety standards.

Corporate LiveWire judge Jake Powers comments: “Kontora created a perfect symbiosis of personalisation and digitalisation, allowing clients to know they are in safe hands whilst also feeling completely
in control of their wealth.”