(Bloomberg) -- Legend Wealth Management, a new Brazilian multifamily office, is hiring in New York and Miami as demand for offshore investments grows among the rich in Latin America’s biggest economy.
The firm hired Eduardo Loja, formerly JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s private banking head of investment for Latin America, to start an office in New York. Andres Sinclair, another former JPMorgan executive, and Alvaro Lopes da Silva Neto, previously chief financial officer of Brazilian private equity fund GP Investments, are joining Legend in Miami.
“They all have more than 20 years working in the U.S., so they can help us to better serve Brazilians seeking to diversify investments abroad,” Sergio Marini, Legend’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.
A veteran of Brazil’s private-banking sector, Marini, 52, said the industry is at “a moment I’ve never seen before, a very important one, with low real interest rates here and around the world” fueling the quest for investment advice. Wealth under management locally in Latin America’s biggest economy rose 6.5% to 1.73 trillion reais ($332 billion) in June from December 2020, according to Anbima, Brazil’s capital-markets association.
That growth helped persuade Marini to leave GPS Investimentos, an affiliate of Julius Baer Family Office in Brazil, were he was a partner, to create his own firm in 2020. He helped found Legend in January, and the firm now has 3.5 billion reais in wealth under management, he said, adding that he had expected to reach that amount only by the end of this year. The figure could rise to 6 billion reais by the beginning of 2022, according to Marini.
“In this market, if you are really independent from big firms, you can better service your client,” said Marini, who is moving to Legend’s Sao Paulo office from the one in Rio de Janeiro.
Marini was a founder of Turim Investimentos, one of the biggest independent multifamily offices in Brazil, in 1998. He left after 11 years to build the family-office business at Banco BTG Pactual, and after seven years moved to GPS, which had already been purchased by Zurich-based Julius Baer Group Ltd.
It was at Turim that he used JPMorgan’s services and got to know Loja, who worked almost 11 years at the New York-based bank. Loja also had stints at Citigroup Inc. and UBS Group AG in New York. Sinclair spent more than 15 years at Genesis Investment Advisors before joining Legend.
Brazilians had about 70.8 billion reais in local funds invested abroad in June, an increase of 8% from December, according to Anbima.
Legend currently has about 40 employees, and the plan is to keep hiring, Marini said, adding that the team could have about 50 people by the end of 2021. Earlier this year, the firm poached the entire sales team from competitor GGP Family Office, the private-banking arm of Brasil Plural SA, including Fernando Barrozo, Mariana Chaves and Flavia Lobao.
Other Legend partners include Brazilian entrepreneur Roberto Justus and veteran investor Sergio Eraldo Salles, who founded the investment firm Crescera Capital with Brazilian Economy Minister Paulo Guedes. Justus and Eraldo Salles are board members of Legend Investimentos, an independent financial-advisory firm with access to Banco BTG Pactual’s digital platform.