Family offices are becoming ever more prevalent in the wealth sector as wealth transfer looms on the horizon. Different families, obviously, have different needs, but how do you find these out? Karman Beyond has a solution for the next gen.
Özge Doğan founded Türkiye’s first independent multi-family office, Karman Beyond, in response to her own family’s wealth management needs.
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PBI: What is the story behind you and Karman Beyond?
Özge Doğan, founder, Karman Beyond: I’m a second gen family member coming from a family who has an amount of wealth, and Karman Beyond’s origins came from exploring my family’s options. A couple of years ago, we were trying to diversify our assets in a more global approach, and I had a brother, so my family wanted to build a more secure future.
Those things led me to find more solutions for my family. Meanwhile, I was looking to understand the wealth management world in a better way, and to try and understand what else could be done and if we were utilising our full potential.
I ended up talking to private bankers and financial institutions, but I couldn’t find the right solution. I was talking with a number of different people and everyone was trying to sell me something but the problem was, from my angle, even though I was only 24 at the time, I had just graduated from law school, my dad is a lawyer for banks and I grew up in this environment. I know what I’m talking about. I’m not an expert, but I knew what my family was looking for, and I couldn’t find it in there.
This was turning into a full-time job, and it was consuming so much time and needed knowhow that I couldn’t do all on my own.
Then when we were talking in London with the head of a private bank who told me that we were already acting like a family office on our own.
We then ended up trying to build this independent multi-family office concept. A wealth owner or family will use us as their single family office whenever they need and however they need it. I built this great team around it, for finance, tax, and legal. Now we’re working with a great team for the last three years for a number of families. We’re offering different solutions and making interesting acquisitions on their behalf. We even helped a family in their acquisition of an aircraft.
We work with families to diversify their portfolios and manage their asset planning, asset allocation, estate planning and succession planning. This is basically what we do at Karman Beyond, and this is how we arrived to where we are now.
How long did it take from realising that you needed to be a family office to becoming a family office?
For almost a year, I was managing my family’s assets on my own. And then over the next 18 months, I ended up expanding our wider team and then serving more families in our network regarding their needs. Since then, we have been fully established as a multi-family office.
I think 2025 will be great for us. We are always working and always trying to build new relationships.
What were the main challenges in actually founding a multi-family office?
You need to speak the language of the family. You need to understand the dynamics, the emotions there, and then you need to also understand the finance world, or understand all the other professional services that you’re providing.
We’re here to make sure that the families’ values align with the wealth management strategy we deploy, and they know the sector.
What are the most common conversations you have with families?
The biggest challenge for them is managing the next gen and an appropriate succession plan. My dad is one of the biggest lawyers in Turkey, and I graduated in law just to be a successor, but now I’m doing something else. I didn’t want to be my dad. That’s something that families are finding hard to navigate; building a bridge with the next gen so that the family business will go on. Some of them are willing to participate. Some of them do not want to.
They want more exposure globally and they want more diversification. They want to be strategic, even with things such as estate planning. We are trying to build this strategy around their wealth so that they will be able to understand their options. And now there are too many options on the table, and everyone is doing a great job. You can choose more than five amazing portfolio management companies, even just in Turkey, and then there’s banks and all the other institutions, so understanding them, defining them, and choosing the right party for your aims can be confusing or more complicated than they would prefer. So that’s also another thing that we’re trying to help families with.
Private banking is often seen as an old boys’ club. Have you found that to be the case? Or is the market changing or developing becoming more inclusive?
I am a woman. I’m 29 and I’m coming from a legal background, so I’m not a typical profile that you would see who is establishing this kind of firm. But here I am. I’m trying to change the wealth management mindset in Turkey, and as far as I go, of course, the team matters so much. I know that the families or the wealth owners go to the people they work with for a long time, because this job needs trust.
There’s a space for a new way of handling things, and the next gen is coming. The next gen wants to be involved with people of the same mindset around them. So that’s why we work with most of the families that we do. I think with more expansion in a family’s mindset, the diversification will appear, and more avenues and opportunities open up for consideration.
What next for Karman Beyond? What are the plans for the next year or the next five years?
We want to grow and we want to work with more families. We want to give the best service for Turkish families. We also want to be able to welcome international investors and families to Turkey, and then we want to guide them to a more prosperous future as well.
