Fortera Nova serves a class of individuals and families who do not see themselves reflected in traditional private banking — and convenes them into something none of them could build alone. Each relationship begins with a private conversation, not a product pitch: we take the time to understand the shape of a client's capital, ambitions and obligations before a single instrument is recommended. What follows is a servicing model built around continuity of relationship, direct principal access, and a community — the Consortium — that compounds in value the longer a member stays inside it.
Fortera Nova is built for a class of individuals and families who do not see themselves reflected in traditional private banking — accomplished, discerning, and unwilling to trade conviction for convention. Eligibility is assessed on the substance of a relationship rather than a single balance figure: we look at liquidity, complexity, time horizon and intent together, and we would rather decline a mandate that is a poor fit than accept assets that do not belong on our platform.
Founders and operators building category-defining companies in technology, climate and culture — accomplished individuals for whom wealth is a by-product of the work, not the point of it. Many arrive mid-liquidity event, with concentrated stock positions, upcoming secondary sales, or the early proceeds of an exit, and need a structure that can move at the pace of a term sheet rather than a quarterly review cycle.
In practice: concentrated single-stock risk managed through collar and forward-sale structures ahead of lock-up expiry; option exercise timing around EMI/qualifying-scheme rules and secondary sale windows; and diversification of exit proceeds into a liquidity sleeve before a single instrument is recommended — always structured alongside a client's own tax and legal counsel.
Custodians of multi-generational family wealth and the family offices that manage it — patrons of culture and the arts whose foundations are already active in philanthropy and the environment. We work alongside existing trustees and advisers rather than displacing them, and we spend disproportionate time on succession: preparing the next generation to hold responsibility for capital they did not create, not merely to inherit it.
In practice: reviewing discretionary trust and family investment company structures for generation-skipping efficiency, refreshing letters of wishes as beneficiaries mature, and coordinating with existing trustees and protectors on governance — rather than replacing the architecture a family has already built.
Senior professionals, engineers and specialists in high-compensation roles who have outgrown retail banking, but have no interest in a portfolio built solely for optics. For this group the priority is usually consolidation — bringing scattered equity compensation, savings and legacy accounts under a single coherent plan — and disciplined tax-aware structuring around cash bonuses, vesting schedules and cross-border postings.
In practice: consolidating RSU, ESPP and deferred-comp holdings scattered across employers, sequencing vesting events against annual allowance and taper considerations, and managing tax-equalisation exposure for professionals on cross-border secondment.
Founders of established, cash-generative private companies who have never sold a share and may never intend to — their wealth is largely illiquid, tied up in the enterprise itself. We help structure personal balance sheets alongside the business, plan for eventual succession or sale years in advance, and build liquidity strategies that do not force a premature exit.
In practice: mapping eligibility for reliefs such as Business Relief and Business Asset Disposal Relief well ahead of any transaction, evaluating employee ownership trust and holding-company reorganisations as succession routes, and building pre-sale liquidity (dividend policy, receivables financing) so a sale is a choice, not a forced event — illustrative considerations only, confirmed with independent tax counsel.
Individuals and households whose lives span two or more jurisdictions — through citizenship, employment, property or family ties — and whose banking needs outgrow any single domestic provider. We coordinate custody, reporting and currency exposure across borders so that a move between countries never means starting a financial relationship from zero.
In practice: applying double-tax-treaty tie-breaker tests to residency questions, keeping FATCA and CRS reporting current across every account a family touches, and reconciling forced-heirship regimes with common-law wills so an estate plan holds together wherever a family happens to live.
The considerations above are illustrative of the world our clients operate in, not a substitute for advice. Every structuring decision at Fortera Nova is taken alongside a client's own independent tax and legal counsel — we bring pattern recognition across many similar situations, not a regulated opinion on any single one.
Photography — Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Beyond the balance sheet, Fortera Nova convenes a private circle of accomplished principals — founders, custodians of family capital, senior professionals — who invest alongside the house in the conviction that doing well and doing good are one motion. Membership is not a marketing tier or a loyalty programme; it is a working community that meets, deliberates and co-invests, and it is the reason clients tell us they stay long after their banking needs alone would have kept them.
con·sor·ti·um — from the Latin consors: those who share one fortune.
Curated impact projects, opened first to members. The house commits its own capital to every opportunity it brings to the table — same terms, same instruments, same downside — so incentives never diverge between principal and member.
Typically structured through a single-purpose SPV with pari passu economics; members and the house sit on the same side of the cap table, on the same side letter, with no preferential liquidation stack for either.
Members surface opportunities from their own industries and networks; the Consortium pools its diligence. Every commitment carries the judgement of many, and every member benefits from expertise no single family office could retain alone.
Information barriers are maintained where a member's own company is the counterparty, and conflicted members are recused from diligence — the same discipline an institutional investment committee would apply.
Closed-door dinners, working sessions and an annual assembly — where members meet the projects, the principals behind them, and one another. Introductions made in these rooms have led as often to commercial partnerships as to co-investment.
Sessions run under Chatham House rule as standard — candour on a live diligence question depends on knowing it will not surface in a boardroom the next morning.
Every position is reported twice: once in financial return, once in verified impact. The Consortium considers neither sufficient without the other, and members receive a single consolidated statement that reflects both.
Impact metrics are tracked against IRIS+ indicator sets and, where a project qualifies, mapped to the relevant SFDR or SDG reference framework — figures are verified, not self-reported by the project sponsor.
Adult children of members are introduced into the Consortium's junior programme ahead of any transfer of wealth — meeting principals, sitting in on diligence, and building judgement before responsibility for capital ever reaches them.
Designed to run alongside — not replace — a family's own succession and generation-skipping planning, so the next generation inherits both capital and the judgement to hold it.
Members may call on the house's principals directly for a second opinion on a matter outside our own mandates — a family business decision, a philanthropic structure, a succession question — without a separate engagement.
Offered as an informal second read, always in coordination with — never in substitution for — a member's own regulated tax, legal and investment advisers.
The house at the centre, capital and diligence committed alongside every member — members connected to one another as much as to us.
The Consortium is deliberately few. Admission is by member introduction, or through founding membership, and each candidacy is reviewed personally rather than processed by a committee — the same discretion we ask members to extend to one another.
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