Aristagora Advisors

After a career spanning over 25 years working for both Japanese and international investment banks, Takeshi Shinoda decided to put retirement in Hawaii on hold after being left frustrated in his efforts to find a suitable financial institution to manage his assets. The capital markets veteran, a former Managing Director at BNP Paribas in Tokyo, conducted his search globally, but it was in his home country of Japan where he was left most disappointed. Initial conversations with Sales representatives at Japanese financial institutions failed to progress after they became aware of Takeshi’s wealth of experience in the financial industry and baulked at the idea of managing his assets.

“I didn’t necessarily expect to find someone more experienced than me to manage my assets, but I hoped that I could at least find someone that would see it as a good challenge”, says Takeshi. Such frustrations paved the way for the founding of Aristagora Advisors, a company that Takeshi created to manage his own assets. Headquartered on the 39th floor of the Atago Green Hills MORI Tower skyscraper in Tokyo, Aristagora has since grown to offer asset management and family office services to high-net-worth individuals and asset management services to institutions such as pension funds.

Similar to Aristagora, traditional Swiss private banks were often founded as single-family offices before taking on the management of other families’ assets. Interestingly, Takeshi is keen for the similarities with traditional Swiss private banks not to stop there as Aristagora aims to retain many of these banks’ important philosophies, such as the delivery of a completely personalized service and a focus on preserving and growing wealth over the long-term but adapt these philosophies to Japanese culture.

Takeshi acknowledges that many other financial institutions claim to offer a personalized service to wealthy individuals and families, but the reality is often different as he knows from firsthand experience of working at such companies that as they grow, the ability for them to offer flexible solutions is often stymied by bureaucracy and an abundance of rules. Flexibility to accommodate clients’ preferences is just one of the ways Aristagora differentiates itself. That is why, at the outset of every client relationship, Aristagora prioritizes getting to know and understanding the client as well as ensuring that the client fully understands Aristagora’s business.

Despite being headquartered in Japan, Aristagora aims to offer its clients unbiased and independent access to products and services from a truly global universe. Indeed, the company derives its name from a coinage of the two Greek words ‘arist’ (best) and ‘agora’ (marketplace). The global nature of the company’s business is further reinforced by its employees, who come from different countries and leverage international working experience.

In addition to asset management, the company has also developed a successful corporate finance business, which has the added advantage of creating synergies with the asset management business as it permits the company to take care not just of wealthy families but also their businesses. Much like the asset management business, a key strength of the corporate finance business is its ability to operate globally, with many of the transactions that the corporate finance team working on being of a cross-border nature.

On one occasion, Aristagora was contacted by a family whose business was seeking an initial public offering in Singapore in order to expand into other Asian markets. Unable to get help from other institutions, the family turned to Aristagora, who helped overcome numerous challenges to eventually IPO on the Singapore stock exchange, making it the first primary listing of a Japanese company on the SGX.