Capital Y

Capital Y

Capital Y opened in 2017, founded by managing partners Nicole Curti, Stanislas de Penfentenyo and Cédric Anker after all three left Stanhope Capital. Curti, a former Lombard Odier banker who had served as CEO of the Swiss branch of a large independent wealth manager, built the new firm around a collaboration-first model. The partnership serves an exclusive group of families from its single office on Rue du Gothard in Chêne-Bourg, Geneva. The firm operates across liquid and illiquid markets, running a top-down asset allocation process for its multi-asset portfolios while sourcing private investments through a curated external network. On the liquid side, fixed income, equity and natural-resource exposure is constructed with a mix of passive vehicles and active managers. The private-markets effort spans direct co-investments and fund commitments across multiple stages — seed through buyout — and a broad set of strategies including private equity, private credit, infrastructure, secondaries and litigation finance. Geography coverage extends to North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Yasmine Bouzourene, the firm's second managing partner, publicly cited private debt as a growing focus (per Citywire, 2024). An estimated $2.6B sits behind roughly a dozen professionals (Altss estimate). Curti holds the presidency of the Alliance of Independent Swiss Wealth Managers and sits on the board of the Kofi Annan Foundation, creating institutional adjacency between the family office and Swiss civic infrastructure. Nicky Sugarman, formerly of Stanhope Capital's private-markets team, advises Capital Y's clients on direct and fund private-equity programs. The firm added senior fixed-income capacity through Annie Raccah, a former HSBC Private Bank deputy head of fixed income. In 2024, former Julius Baer CEO Philipp Rickenbacher was cited as a close collaborator with Curti. The structural differentiator is the combination of a no-retrocession, no-proprietary-product model with a heavily outsourced private-markets engine. Capital Y keeps portfolio construction and client relationships in-house while picking external managers and co-investment partners by mandate. That posture makes it a capital allocator and governance layer for its families, not a product manufacturer — an architecture that mirrors the larger European multi-family offices that scale through external-alignment rather than vertical integration.