Secondaries have become increasingly important to family offices.

JP Morgan reported 28% of those surveyed in their 2026 Global Family Office Report intend to increase secondary allocation in the near term. 

Global secondary market transactions exceeded $240 billion last year, highlighting their value in providing liquidity to primary investors and providing new investors the chance to acquire shares often in late-stage tech companies that are already making waves. 

In just the last six months we’ve seen secondary opportunities for in-demand shares in OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, Polymarket and more.

Yet secondary transactions have an elusive feel to them, being largely hidden from view and moving quickly, with the best deals shared between private networks.

We spoke to Diane Dupré, who after a decade at UBS structuring secondary transactions for some iconic private companies, left to start Clifton Partners.

“I sat at the intersection of two worlds every day: private companies managing their cap table, and private wealth looking for access. I watched both sides operate and watched the infrastructure between them fail both of them consistently - that's why I left.”

She co-founded Clifton with Guillaume Moubeche, a tech entrepreneur who has invested his own capital into private tech for years. They combine their institutional structuring background and founder network to offer a more efficient secondaries solution to family offices.

“The best secondary opportunities in late-stage private tech move in a few days. They never become a formal process - they flow through relationships built over years, directly with founders, GPs, and early shareholders who need discretion above everything else.”

Dupré says banks can’t operate at that speed, not because the people aren't talented, but because the institution isn't built for it.

“Six weeks of compliance, three committees, and a distribution list of 500 clients kills the deal and the relationship simultaneously. I spent ten years watching that gap cost family offices real money, not because they lacked conviction, but because the infrastructure around them was structurally unable to deliver what the market actually required.”

Clifton works with sophisticated non-retail investors only: family offices, founders post-exit, and select institutional partners, working with ticket sizes between $500K and $50M per transaction.

“We are not a platform. We don't aggregate small tickets or run broad distribution processes.

The families and institutions we work with understand how this market operates; they value discretion, they make decisions quickly, and they don't need a formal process to feel confident about an opportunity.”

Dupré is based between Paris, Cape Town and the US, but when it comes to family offices, says the profile matters far more than the geography.

“We look for investors who think in decades, move in days, and understand that the best opportunities don't always come with a deck and a roadshow.”

Deals are highly selective and come through their network but also the family offices they work with; the commonality is the need for speed and preparedness. 

It’s here where two common secondaries market misconceptions come into play.

“The first is timing and supply. Most buyers approach a secondary like a public market trade; find the asset, agree on price, execute. What they miss is that supply in this market is not continuous. A block of shares in a company like Revolut or Stripe doesn't appear on a regular schedule, it appears when a specific shareholder like an early investor or GP managing liquidity needs to move. That window is narrow.” 

Dupré notes the second misconception: discretion. Many investors treat it as a courtesy, but it’s a valuable asset to actively build. And it costs you if you don’t protect it. 

“The founders and GPs who control the best deal flow have long memories. They know which buyers kept transactions confidential and which ones didn't. They know who ran quiet processes and who shopped the deal across twenty advisors. That reputation determines who gets called first on the next opportunity.”

Dupré says family offices looking to get access to higher-quality secondary transactions should aim to be present in conversations before a deal exists. 

“Stop treating it like a research problem - it's a relationship problem. The best secondaries move through personal networks before any formal process exists.”

She suggests the right question to ask isn’t “how do we find more deals” but rather "how do we become the people who get called?"

From her perspective, there are three things that determine that:

Understanding the importance of speed is fundamental. A secondary transaction doesn’t work like a primary round.

“I've watched family offices spend three weeks in internal review on an opportunity we brought them. Legal review, investment committee, additional diligence requests. All legitimate. All well-intentioned. By week one the allocation was gone. Not because the seller found a better price. Because another buyer was ready and they weren't.”

In the secondaries market, Dupré says readiness is the price of entry, not capital, conviction, nor sophistication.

“The families consistently accessing the best opportunities have solved this before a specific deal arrives. They've pre-aligned internally on the asset class. They have legal counsel already familiar with these structures. They know their own answer to the key questions before anyone asks them.”

“Speed is important but it should never come at the expense of due diligence. You need to have high conviction in the partner you're working with - ideally a Tier 1 GP or the company directly when possible. Steer clear of SPVs created by unregulated brokers with well-established presence. Always scrutinize the fee structure, and avoid deals with too many layers - or if layers do exist, make sure you fully understand the structure at each level. And always demand proof of shares.

Working with family offices frequently provides unexpected insights, as she’s discovered along the way.

“Size tells you almost nothing. I've worked with $10B family offices that couldn't make a decision in under three months. And $100M family offices that wired within 48 hours, asked the right questions, and never needed hand-holding.”

“I've seen small families move slower than any institution I encountered at UBS, and large families move faster than I thought possible given their governance structure. What actually predicts behavior has nothing to do with AUM, but comes down to two things: who is making the decision and how close are they to the capital.”

Dupré also believes Europe and the Middle East are a decade behind in terms of market maturity, presenting a unique opportunity.

“Family offices in these regions have serious capital and genuine conviction in the same companies, but almost no clean, trusted infrastructure to access them. Nobody is building for that investor specifically. That's a significant gap and it's closing faster than people think.”

Another opportunity she sees is in trust infrastructure. Since there currently aren’t verified track records for intermediaries or benchmarks on fee structures, investors often learn things through expensive mistakes.  

“The innovation opportunity is in making that knowledge accessible without destroying the relationship dynamics that make the market work. Not a platform. Not a marketplace. But the tools and standards that allow sophisticated investors to walk into any secondary transaction knowing exactly what good looks like.”

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