A Partners Group founder is carving out his own unit inside the shared family office

Urs Wietlisbach, one of three billionaire co-founders of Swiss private equity firm Partners Group, is setting up an independent investment unit within PG3 AG, the family office that has managed the founders’ combined wealth since 2013.

The other two founders are Alfred Gantner and Marcel Erni. All three have large families and have started thinking about how their wealth will be managed in the next generation.

What is happening

The new unit will be led by Jascha Forster, who is currently the chief investment officer of Thomas Schmidheiny’s family office, Spectrum Value Management. Hiring someone of that seniority to run a carve-out signals that this is not a small adjustment.

Wietlisbach is seeking independence over individual investment decisions. Since PG3 was established, all three founders have invested through the same vehicle. The carve-out allows Wietlisbach to make his own calls without needing alignment from the other two.

The official line

After the initial reporting by Bloomberg, the founders issued a statement denying any fracture among the trio. They said PG3 remains the sole platform for their wealth, and that a new shareholders’ agreement is being drafted only to smooth generational succession.

That may well be true. It is also true that creating a separate investment arm, hiring external leadership for it, and announcing it publicly is not what you do when everything is fine.

Why it matters

PG3 is an unusual structure. Three unrelated billionaire families managing their wealth through a single shared office is uncommon. It works when the principals are aligned and actively involved. It gets harder when the next generation enters the picture, because the children of one founder do not necessarily share the investment preferences, risk appetite, or time horizon of the children of another.

The move toward separation is not a failure. It is what happens when a shared structure starts to encounter the natural divergence that comes with time and generational turnover. The question for other families in similar arrangements is whether they have a mechanism for doing the same thing without it looking like a falling-out.

Wietlisbach’s approach is worth noting: carve out, don’t split. The shared platform remains. The individual investment authority is layered on top. It is a hybrid model that tries to preserve the benefits of scale and shared infrastructure while giving each family the autonomy it wants.

Whether that hybrid holds depends on what happens next. If the other two founders follow suit, PG3 becomes less a shared office and more a shared service provider. That is a different thing entirely.