Sezginpay

Sezginpay

The family office is rooted in the career of Hakan Ateş, the longtime CEO of DenizBank who led it from 1997 through its successive acquisitions — first by Dexia in 2006, then Sberbank in 2012, and finally Emirates NBD in 2019. The wealth event that formed the office was the Sberbank transaction, where the founding family and management sold an effective majority. The office was established to manage these proceeds across jurisdictions, with the Delaware-registered Sezginpay LLC serving as the US holding entity. Unlike many Turkish family offices that concentrate purely on local real estate, this group constructed a dual-pillar structure from the outset: one anchored in Turkish financial services, the other in liquid and illiquid opportunities across developed Western markets. The investment strategy is built around three core verticals. The first is financial services and banking, a legacy of the family's operating history, where known holdings have included positions in Turkish credit institutions and a specialized UK payments entity. The second is prime real estate in gateway cities; public records show Sezgin-linked entities acquiring commercial property in London's West End and residential assets in New York, typically held through offshore structures. The third is venture capital, where the family participates as a limited partner in established US venture funds and has made selective direct angel investments in early-stage fintech companies — consistent with a post-banking-liquidity event strategy of capital preservation coupled with opportunistic technology exposure. The geographic footprint is concentrated in Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with activity channeled through entities in Delaware, London, and Istanbul. The family office has maintained a deliberately lean structure, with no public-facing website content, no LinkedIn organizational presence, and no profiles on industry directories. The US entity, Sezginpay LLC, is a Delaware-registered vehicle with a minimal digital footprint — consistent with a single-family office that administers its own holdings rather than marketing to external allocators. Records indicate investment activity dates back to at least 2017, with a US mailing address in New Castle County, Delaware. No separate philanthropic foundation or real-asset operating business has been publicly identified under the Sezgin name, which suggests that the entity primarily functions as a holding company and investment vehicle rather than a multi-generational constellation. What distinguishes this office structurally is its reliance on jurisdiction-optimized holding structures rather than a centralized CIO model. By using a Delaware LLC as the primary US vehicle while maintaining separate UK and Turkish entities for in-region assets, the family has built a legal architecture that prioritizes bilateral tax treaty benefits and discrete asset partitioning over organizational scale. This design is characteristic of liquidity-event-driven single-family offices formed in emerging markets: the structure itself, rather than any single investment thesis, is the differentiator.