Access to the best investment opportunities often depends less on available capital than on relationships built over years. Banks routinely offer their most attractive deals first to other institutions, leaving smaller private investors to compete for whatever remains once the biggest players have already taken their share of the best terms.
O’Hara Administration, the investment group led by Alejandro Betancourt, built its way around that barrier by co-investing directly alongside European banks rather than competing against them for scraps. The arrangement gives the family office access to deal flow and financing typically reserved for institutional players, while O’Hara continues to hold assets across commercial real estate, hedge fund sponsorships, private equity and venture capital without a fixed exit timeline pushing any single holding out the door.
Deal Flow Built on Partnership
A bank that finances or co-sponsors a transaction sees opportunities long before they reach the open market, where pricing has already adjusted and the best terms are gone. Partnering with those banks directly, instead of competing against them, gives O’Hara a seat at deals most private investors never see, let alone have the chance to bid on. That seat at the table matters more than the size of any single check O’Hara writes.
That access extends to financing as well as deal sourcing. Banks bring balance sheets and lending relationships that few family offices can replicate on their own, and co-investment lets O’Hara draw on both without building that infrastructure from scratch or paying the overhead a standalone lending arm would require. Every deal sourced this way carries the credibility of a bank that already vetted it before O’Hara ever saw the paperwork.
Institutional Access, Independent Terms
What separates O’Hara from the banks it partners with is the absence of a clock ticking in the background of every decision. A private equity fund tied to outside limited partners typically has to exit an investment within a fixed window, sometimes before the asset has finished growing into its full value. A bank, for its part, still has to manage its own balance sheet under regulatory limits that a private family office simply doesn’t carry.
O’Hara answers to no outside investors and sets no fund life, so the bank co-investments it enters can run as long as the underlying business actually warrants, not as long as a subscription agreement allows. The wider group is described as an international investment group that works as a family office, with positions spanning consumer brands, banking, mobility and technology, giving it a wide enough view to recognize which bank partnerships are worth the long-term commitment.