Coming Home: The Goldman Sachs Veteran Who Bet Her Career on Istanbul's Private Wealth Market

Karahan Varlik Danismanligi operates out of Nisantasi, a neighbourhood that signals old Istanbul money, a deliberate positioning for a firm whose entire value proposition rests on discretion and proximity to Turkey's new wealth holders rather than the glass-and-marble corporate aesthetic of Levent's banking district. The firm's positioning reflects a thesis: that the emerging class of Turkish tech entrepreneurs wants wealth advisory that feels personal and peer-level, not institutional.

Elif Karahan, 42, is the founder of the firm, which launched in September 2021 with three employees, a single-page website, and a client book assembled almost entirely through personal introductions. Her career trajectory is a matter of public record. An economics degree from Bilkent was followed by a graduate trainee position at Goldman Sachs International in London, where she spent six years in the private wealth management division advising European family offices on multi-asset allocation. She subsequently moved to Schroders' wealth management arm, eventually becoming a director responsible for portfolios totalling over 800 million pounds. She sat on the investment committee. By every conventional measure, she had made it in London.

The business case for the return was specific. Between 2015 and 2021, Turkey produced a remarkable cohort of technology entrepreneurs who built and sold companies at valuations that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Gaming studios, e-commerce platforms, SaaS companies, logistics startups. The Turkish tech ecosystem generated an estimated $3.5 billion in exit value during that period, creating a new class of liquid wealth holders who were, by most accounts, profoundly underserved. The structural gap is straightforward: Turkish private banks typically assign junior relationship managers to newly wealthy tech founders, offering scripted advice around structured deposits. Swiss private banks will accept Turkish clients, but minimums of five million dollars and significant cultural distance make the experience impersonal. No domestic player was offering what the top-tier London or New York firms provide to tech founders in those markets: a holistic, multi-generational wealth strategy delivered by an adviser with direct experience in that world. The gap, in other words, was not in products (Turkey has products) but in judgement, context, and trust.

The challenges facing the venture are structural. Turkey's regulatory framework for independent wealth advisory is underdeveloped compared to the UK's Financial Conduct Authority regime. The SPK's licensing categories are oriented towards institutional asset management, not bespoke family office advisory, which means the firm operates under a portfolio management licence that was designed for a different purpose. Currency volatility makes long-term financial planning an exercise in constant recalibration; a significant share of advisory time necessarily goes to FX hedging strategies that would be unnecessary in a stable-currency environment. And the talent pipeline is thin. Finding associates who combine Turkish market knowledge with international-grade analytical skills and the social fluency to advise clients who have recently exited companies worth tens of millions of dollars requires a profile that Turkey's finance programmes do not reliably produce. SPK filings indicate the firm employed four people as of early 2022, reportedly drawn from an applicant pool of over two hundred, a selectivity ratio consistent with the boutique positioning. The firm's thesis is explicitly anti-scale: the aim is durability over growth, a distinction that matters in a market where many financial firms have expanded quickly and failed to retain clients. Nine months after launch, Karahan Varlik Danismanligi managed advisory relationships covering approximately 340 million TL in assets, according to available disclosures. The firm was not yet profitable but reported being ahead of internal projections. Notably, it had not lost a single client since launch. In an industry where client retention is the only metric that ultimately matters, that may be the most persuasive number of all.