Bruno Ghio only works with Peruvian families at Allie, the wealth management firm he founded five years ago.
But more and more, those clients are being serviced out of his Miami office as new generations settle in the U.S. And the political volatility that drove billions of dollars abroad ensures that it stays there.
“We’ve grown a lot with the children of our clients in Miami,” Ghio, 55, said in an interview. “About 30% to 40% of our clients are now American citizens,” compared with closer to 20% in the past.
In Peru, a country of 34 million people with an economy of $240 billion, volatile politics and the pandemic upended decades of economic stability, triggering as much as $15 billion to leave the country, according to the central bank. As a result, wealthy Peruvians now invest most of their liquid assets outside the country, benefiting firms like Allie that provide investment, tax and succession advice.
Allie, founded in 2019, is among the top three independent multifamily offices in Peru, meaning it manages at least $2 billion, Ghio said, declining to give an exact figure. The firm, with offices in Lima and Miami, works with 23 families who have an average $50 million each.
Ghio, a former managing director at Banco de Credito del Peru with a stint as a senior private banker at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, owns 100% of the firm, which currently has 10 employees. Most have worked together for more than a decade, and two are based in Miami. Of the 10, eight are “front-office employees” including Ghio, and each works with three to four families.
To show how hands-on Ghio remains, he briefly excuses himself during the interview to close a trade for a client. The senior advisers handle all aspects of client services, from paying marina fees to proposing private markets transactions, he said.
'BIG FAMILIES'
While the wealthiest families in Peru have their own single-family offices and investment firms like Grupo Breca and Grupo Romero, Allie was founded with the idea of targeting large families and offering them more cost-efficient ways to manage their finances and planning, Ghio said.
“There was an opportunity to only work with big families but have few of them,” he said.
In its latest wealth report, Knight Frank said Latin America was an outlier in 2023, with the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals — or those with more than $30 million — shrinking by 3.6%. Globally, that number grew by 4.2% in the period. Miami, the report noted, is a city on the rise.
And while money floods into South Florida, there’s a dearth of wealth creation in Peru and the rest of the region.
While mass consumption and retail have proved resilient, areas like agriculture and fisheries have been affected by climate change and are more volatile, Ghio said. Peru hasn’t been a hotbed of regional tech startups, either. Despite the lull, Allie isn’t thinking of expanding beyond its core of attending to Peruvian families.