If you think it’s hard swimming against the tide of misinformation and dubious ‘news’ reports surrounding us these days, imagine facing that challenge with significant sums of client money at stake.
Filtering out the market noise is a prerequisite for success in wealth and asset management. It’s something that Glion alumnus Jad Karam has mastered over the years – but how does he do it?
“By process, not willpower,” he says. “Our framework is built on first principles: that wealth is created through active, high-conviction positions and safeguarded through diversification. We make decisions against a client’s risk profile and a volatility target that ultimately goes with their return target, not against the day’s headlines. Sometimes that goes contrary to our client’s own views and behavioral biases, but part of our job is to keep them anchored to the plan.”
Jad is quick to acknowledge that client demands are more complex than ever in this age of AI. “Most clients today have AI agents and are aware of everything happening around them; so the value of an advisor goes beyond knowledge. It is about trust, visibility and alignment. It’s also about understanding how a family office works from the inside, because most of our clients are single family offices, which are quite complex. They come to us for our expertise across the whole chain, from decision making to processes to deployment, and we are fully aligned with them on all fronts.”
It’s an approach that has powered an exceptional period of growth for Broadgate Advisers, the global financial house that Jad joined in 2019. Established in 2015, this partner-led business brings together three business lines – wealth and asset management, M&A advisory and venture capital (through BY Venture Partners) – and operates from offices across the GCC, the wider MENA region, Europe and Southeast Asia.
At home in Geneva
Jad is based in the Geneva office (pictured left), which is Broadgate Advisers’ headquarters for its asset management and family office business.
“I am a director in the wealth and asset management team, but my role is broader than that,” he explains. “I also work on business development for the group as a whole, including M&A advisory and venture capital, so I help to connect our three business lines for clients.”
The present office setup is a far cry from when Jad became the firm’s first employee in Geneva, helping to establish Broadgate’s presence in the city. “I found the office space and helped to configure it for our requirements. But on opening day the tables and chairs I’d ordered hadn’t arrived and so I was basically sitting on the floor!” he remembers.
The rarefied world of high finance may also seem distant from the business of hospitality. However, like a number of other Glion alumni, Jad has found banking and investment to be a fruitful career pathway. For him it all comes down to soft skills.
“In our business, just like in hospitality, the client relationship is everything. How you interact with your clients, how you make the connection with them, how you understand and solve their problems… it’s a fundamental part of my role.
“In a way I never left hospitality, I just define it differently. What I enjoyed about it was being with people and serving them, and that’s what I do today. I serve families, manage their wealth and look after their financial affairs. And who knows, maybe after I ‘retire’ from the financial sector I might come back to hospitality in the traditional sense?”
A big surprise
Jad’s degree with Glion had a ‘major’ in hospitality finance and revenue management, but he’s quick to correct any assumption that he was already nurturing aspirations to enter the financial world when he arrived on campus.
“Not at all. Finance was certainly not my ambition when I chose Glion. In fact, I almost failed my French baccalaureate because of maths, so I arrived thinking I was not a numbers person!
“I chose hospitality because I’d worked in restaurants during my summer holidays and my parents had realized I was a ‘relationship person’, so the hospitality sector seemed a logical career path. The finance angle was something I discovered while at Glion, and for that I can thank the classes I had with Miss Pia Huh – she made finance and numbers click with me, enabling me to fall in love with them.
“In fact, my degree thesis on investing in high-risk emerging markets, with a case study on Lebanon, could be seen as a preview of my career, because much of my work since has been about connecting capital with the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region.”
The finance-hospitality connection
Post-Glion, a desire to go deeper into investment theory prompted Jad to undertake the University of Geneva’s Certificate of Advanced Studies in Portfolio Management, a course that encompassed financial mathematics, quantitative methods and risk management. Later, he studied the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program, passing levels I and II.
And while he hasn’t followed other Glion graduates into the hotel business, Jad sees distinct parallels with the typical hospitality career progression and his own.
“To run a hotel properly you need to understand every position, from housekeeping and reception up to department manager and then general manager. I followed the same pathway in banking, going from back office to middle office to front office.
“The ‘back office’ was EFG Private Bank in Geneva, where I started in the lowest possible position, opening securities in the system so that bankers could invest in them, alongside monitoring funds, NAVs (net asset values) and investment restrictions. It wasn’t glamorous but it taught me the technicalities of financial investment and how a bank functions behind the scenes.
“The ‘middle office’ was J.P. Morgan Private Bank, where I worked in the Portfolio Management Group deploying the bank’s investment strategies into client portfolios. And then the ‘front office’ was BLOM Bank, where I began as assistant relationship manager before being promoted to senior private banker, managing my own client ‘book’ across the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), the Middle East and West Africa.
“So, the milestones were learning the operations, learning investment selection at a global finance house, and then learning to originate and manage clients. Then in 2019 I went from banker to builder when I joined Broadgate.”
Supporting Lebanon sustainably
In that time Jad also earned Swiss citizenship (see photo); however, he remains fiercely proud of his Lebanese heritage and is determined to give something back to a country which has suffered so much in recent times. The primary vehicle for this is ALAM, short for Association Liban Avenir Meilleur, a Swiss non-profit he co-founded in December 2020 and for which he acts as Treasurer on a pro bono basis.
“Many Lebanese diaspora want to help the country but it can be difficult to work out which organizations on the ground are reliable. Our model is to identify and find credible NGO partners who are working across five areas: humanitarian aid, health, education, sustainable development and the environment. Since 2021 we have raised around CHF 8 million, supporting some 33 projects and reaching more than 42,000 people.”
The ALAM methodology is based on the maxim ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’. One example involves helping an expert local honey producer gain the necessary licenses to export into Europe. Another example involves installing solar panels on school buildings and thus drastically reducing energy costs, freeing up much-needed cash for school books and educational materials.
Meet the Accelerators
Jad’s enthusiasm for startups goes back several years. From 2021 to 2023 he was a board member of the EU Tech Chamber’s Startup Commission, where he helped organize quarterly investment forums bringing startups and venture investors together, and mentored founders on their business plans and fundraising.
“What draws me to startups is creativity,” he says. “I love the entrepreneurial mindset of people who are trying to build the future and disrupt how things are done today. I like disruption, new ideas and new ways of doing things. Around 2020 was my first step into the startup and venture capital world. Until then I had looked only at liquid markets and blue-chip companies, and after 15 years of doing much the same thing it had become a bit boring.”
Broadgate’s venture capital arm, BY Venture Partners, gave him the ideal platform. The group has even invested in a cloud kitchen startup in Geneva, where Jad sat on the advisory board and was responsible for investor relations. He continues to help clients review opportunities of this kind.
Closer to ‘home’ Jad is deeply involved with our Glion Alumni Accelerator competition, which invites students and alumni to submit entrepreneurial ideas and startup businesses as an opportunity to secure expert mentoring and, ultimately, a cash prize.
“I’m a member of the organizing committee and I also act as a mentor to one of the pre-selected startups which are invited to go forward to the Pitch Battle. I think the Accelerator is a brilliant initiative and I’m really looking forward to the next ‘finals day’ which takes place in June 2027.
"As a mentor I aim to help founders put a framework around their idea as well as giving advice on how to access markets. You need creativity to be an entrepreneur, but you also need structure. You must think about the valuation, the business plan, investor relationships, growth strategy and market penetration. These are the angles we try to bring to the table.”
Shortly before this issue went to press, Jad also earned himself another exciting Glion-related responsibility: to join the visiting faculty for the new specialization in Entrepreneurship & Innovation which will be offered with the Master’s in International Hospitality Business from 2027 intakes (subject to final approval).
He is thrilled at the opportunity, noting, “The Entrepreneurial Finance course will look at the financial decisions which are specific to entrepreneurial ventures at each stage of their development. What I want to bring to the classroom is the diverse exposure I have had in my career. I have been on the other side of the table analyzing private equity funds, venture capital funds and direct investments in startups, so I bring the eye of an evaluator or analyst to the students.
“I want to show them the financial tools founders need: how to value a young company; how venture and private capital work; how to structure a deal; how to raise capital and how to read investor terms. And I want to teach from practice, using real cases from my work in wealth management and venture capital.”
With a packed 2027 in the offing, Jad intends to stay focused on the ‘day job’ – and that means continuing the success story that is Broadgate Advisers.
“In the medium term I want to keep growing our wealth and family office business and extending our platform, including private markets and our own investment solutions. I aim to stay true to what made me leave banking: being fully aligned and conflict free with families and being the partner who understands their whole structure. I also want to integrate wealth management, M&A and venture capital even more closely, so that our clients get the full benefit of the group and can access anything and everything they want to be exposed to.
“In the longer term, I want to stay close to venture capital and the next generation of entrepreneurs, through investing, mentoring and teaching. And I will keep supporting initiatives like ALAM, because empowering people, especially in Lebanon, matters a great deal to me.”
• To discover more about Broadgate Advisers, visit the website
Be wise, specialize
Asset Development and Finance is one of three career-focused specializations offered to students of our Bachelor’s in International Hospitality Business. Click the link to discover more.
