The Missing Service: Why Turkey's New Tech Wealth Has Nowhere Sophisticated to Go

Between 2015 and 2021, Turkey's technology sector produced a cohort of exits that, by any reasonable historical standard, was extraordinary. Zynga acquired Peak Games for $1.8 billion. Trendyol attracted a multi-billion-dollar valuation and strategic investment from Alibaba. Getir, Hepsiburada, and a constellation of smaller gaming studios, SaaS companies, and logistics startups created liquidity events that collectively generated an estimated $3.5 billion in realized value. These were not paper gains on venture portfolios; they were cash-in-hand events that turned founders, early employees, and angel investors into people with ten, fifty, or a hundred million dollars in liquid wealth, often overnight. The financial question that follows such an event is both obvious and urgent: what do you do with the money?

In London or New York, the answer is well established. A tech founder who exits at $50 million will be contacted, within days if not hours, by private bankers at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and UBS, by independent registered investment advisers with expertise in concentrated stock positions and tax-efficient diversification, and by multi-family offices that specialize in exactly this kind of newly liquid wealth. The ecosystem is deep, competitive, and highly specialized. A founder can choose between dozens of sophisticated advisers who understand the specific psychology and financial profile of someone who has just experienced a liquidity event: the desire to preserve rather than grow, the anxiety of having a single large number rather than a salary, the complex tax and estate planning needs that emerge when wealth arrives in a lump sum rather than incrementally over a career. The advisory infrastructure in these markets has been built over decades, refined through competition, and staffed by professionals whose entire careers are organized around serving this exact client.

In Turkey, no comparable infrastructure exists. This is not a matter of opinion; it is a structural observation. The Turkish private wealth advisory market, as of mid-2022, is characterized by a set of gaps that are individually understandable but collectively striking.

The Private Banking Gap

Turkey's private banks are, in most cases, divisions of the country's large commercial and participation banks. Their relationship managers are typically drawn from the broader retail or commercial banking talent pool and rotated through private banking as a career stage rather than a permanent specialization. The service model is heavily product-driven: structured deposits, proprietary mutual funds, insurance wrappers, and FX-linked notes assembled by the bank's own treasury desk. For a client whose wealth is in the tens of millions of dollars and whose needs include multi-jurisdictional tax planning, venture co-investment opportunities, philanthropic structuring, and long-term intergenerational wealth transfer, the standard Turkish private banking offering is not merely insufficient; it is oriented toward a fundamentally different kind of client. The private banks are optimized for high-net-worth individuals with 2 to 5 million TL in investable assets, not for ultra-high-net-worth founders with $50 million in post-exit liquidity. The gap is one of capability, not willingness.

The Swiss Alternative and Its Limits

Swiss private banks have historically served as the default option for wealthy individuals from emerging markets whose domestic banking systems cannot meet their needs. Turkey is no exception. UBS, Credit Suisse, Julius Baer, and Pictet all have or had Turkish desks, and wealthy Turkish families have maintained Swiss banking relationships for generations. But the Swiss option presents specific friction points for newly wealthy tech founders. Minimum account sizes at the major Swiss institutions typically start at $5 million and, for the quality of service that justifies the relationship, often require $10 million or more. The cultural distance is real: a 35-year-old Turkish gaming studio founder who made his money building mobile games is not the natural client for a Zurich-based relationship manager whose typical client is a third-generation European industrialist. Communication happens in English, the advisory framework is built around European tax and estate law, and the investment products are oriented toward global diversified portfolios that may not account for the specific currency, regulatory, and repatriation considerations that matter to a Turkish wealth holder. The Swiss banks are excellent at what they do, but what they do is not tailored to this particular client.

The Regulatory Constraint

Turkey's Capital Markets Board, the SPK, administers a licensing regime that was designed primarily for institutional asset management. The available licence categories, portfolio management, investment advisory, and related designations, are oriented toward firms that manage pooled investment vehicles or provide securities-level advice to institutional clients. The concept of a registered independent adviser, the RIA model that underpins the American wealth advisory market, has no direct equivalent in Turkish securities law. A firm that wants to offer holistic, fee-only wealth advisory to high-net-worth individuals (encompassing investment management, tax planning coordination, estate structuring, and lifestyle financial planning) must either operate under a portfolio management licence designed for a different purpose or structure its services in ways that fit imperfectly within the existing regulatory categories. This is not an insurmountable barrier, but it raises compliance costs, limits the range of services that can be offered under a single licence, and discourages new entrants who might otherwise see the market opportunity.

Currency as Complication

Any discussion of wealth advisory in Turkey must contend with the lira. For a client whose liabilities are partly in TL (living expenses, domestic real estate, tax obligations) and partly in hard currency (children's international education, offshore investments, travel), financial planning becomes an exercise in constant currency recalibration. The advisory value that a sophisticated wealth manager provides in a stable-currency environment, long-term asset allocation, retirement modelling, intergenerational transfer planning, is complicated enormously when the denominating currency can lose 30% or more of its value in a single year, as the lira did in late 2021. A significant portion of any Turkish wealth adviser's time and analytical capacity must necessarily go toward FX hedging and currency allocation strategies that would be irrelevant in a dollar, euro, or Swiss franc environment. This is not a criticism of Turkish advisers; it is a structural reality that makes the job harder and the required skill set broader than in most developed markets.

The Talent Problem

Perhaps the most binding constraint is human capital. The ideal private wealth adviser for Turkey's new tech wealth would combine deep Turkish market knowledge (tax law, real estate, domestic equity markets, regulatory environment) with international-grade investment expertise, fluency in the specific psychology of post-exit founders, and the social credibility to advise peers rather than clients. That profile is extraordinarily rare. Turkey's finance programmes produce excellent analysts and portfolio managers, but the holistic skill set required for top-tier wealth advisory, part investment management, part tax strategy, part family therapy, is not something that any Turkish university programme is designed to teach. The professionals who do possess this combination tend to be working at international firms in London, Zurich, or New York, where compensation is higher and the career infrastructure is more developed. Attracting them back to Istanbul requires a compelling proposition, and the domestic market has not yet produced one at scale.

The Opportunity

The structural gap described above is, viewed from a different angle, a market opportunity. Turkey has created significant new wealth. That wealth needs sophisticated advisory. The domestic supply of such advisory is thin. In competitive market terms, this is a textbook case of unmet demand. The question is whether the conditions will emerge for that demand to be met: regulatory modernization that creates a clear licensing path for independent wealth advisory, compensation structures that can attract talent from international firms, and a client base willing to pay fees for advice rather than receiving it free (and conflicted) from product-distributing banks. None of these conditions is impossible. Several are, in fact, already beginning to develop. But the pace of change is slow relative to the pace at which Turkey is producing new wealth, and the gap between the two is, for now, the defining feature of the market.

The founders and early investors who participated in Turkey's tech boom deserve financial advice that matches the sophistication of what they built. Whether that advice will come from domestic firms, international entrants, or some hybrid that has not yet been imagined remains an open question. What is clear is that, as of mid-2022, the market is not providing it at the level the opportunity warrants.