How Leonardo Silva built White Family & Co. from nothing into a cross-border advisory firm connecting companies, capital, and discipline across the UK, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal, one mandate at a time.
In cross-border finance, the firms that endure are rarely the loudest. They are the ones still in the room once a deal’s first excitement has faded, when the real work begins: reconciling the figures, rebuilding trust between counterparties, and protecting the client’s interest through the unglamorous middle of a transaction. It is on exactly that kind of work that White Family & Co. has built its name. What makes the firm worth knowing, though, is not only how it works. It is how quickly it was built, and by whom.
A Firm Built From Nothing
White Family & Co. did not begin with a balance sheet, a brand, or a roster of blue-chip relationships. It began with Leonardo Silva and a single conviction: that there was room in the market for an advisory firm that took discipline more seriously than theatre.
Silva’s route there was not the conventional one. He was self-employed in technology at seventeen. He moved into telecoms sales for one of Europe’s largest operators, and before he was twenty-one, he was building and leading a field team across the Benelux and French markets. Consulting and advisory work followed. In 2023, he founded White Family & Co. and set out to do something most people in the industry would have called premature: to place a brand-new firm directly between London’s capital markets and the founders, principals, and institutions of continental Europe, and to make it work mandate by mandate.
Three years on, that is precisely where the firm sits. Headquartered in London, with offices in Salzburg, Zug, and Lisbon, White Family & Co. operates at the intersection of mergers and acquisitions, structured finance, and capital advisory.
The People Who Chose to Build It With Him
A firm’s earliest partners say more about it than any brochure, and White Family & Co.’s say a great deal. Among those who joined Silva is Paulo da Silva, formerly Director-General of the Resources Directorate at Portugal’s Ministry of National Defense and a Senior Advisor to the Treasury Department, who came into the firm and brought many of the people he had worked alongside with him. That someone who built his career in the senior ranks of Portuguese public administration chose to help build a young advisory firm, rather than the reverse, tells you something about the conviction inside it.
The firm now carries a bench of partners and senior advisors spanning M&A, structured finance, capital raising, and wealth management, drawn from public service, banking, and international markets. It is a deep team for a young firm, and a deliberate one.
Built to Move Quickly Without Cutting Corners
What the firm can do under pressure shows up most clearly in how it handles a live deal. An early-stage company needed capital, the right investor was within reach, and White Family & Co. moved from a first conversation to a committed investment in a matter of days rather than the quarters such raises usually take. Speed was never the goal in itself. Acting the moment it made sense to, with the homework already done, was.
That distinction matters because speed without substance is just luck. On a separate mandate, the firm took on a credit facility of real structural complexity, the kind of instrument that often consumes the better part of a year to arrange, and completed it in a fraction of that time with every protection intact. Complexity handled with discipline, and without unnecessary delay, is what the firm is built around.
A Firm Built for the Space Between Markets
London, Salzburg, Zug, and Lisbon may look like an eclectic set of addresses, but each reflects a genuine market need. Portuguese and southern European companies increasingly want the capital, structural rigor, and governance standards associated with the Alpine financial centers as they scale. Investors and financing partners across the UK, Switzerland, and Austria, in turn, often need a partner who understands the regulatory, cultural, and commercial fabric of the Iberian markets. White Family & Co. sits precisely in that gap.
A cross-border mandate often means reconciling different accounting bases, different creditor expectations, and different negotiating cultures, all within the same week.
That orientation shapes how the firm works. Mandates are rarely confined to a single jurisdiction’s playbook. The firm’s partners describe its real value not as executing transactions, but as translating between parties who would otherwise struggle to understand one another’s assumptions.
Three Illustrative Mandates
For reasons of confidentiality, and because that is how serious advisory work operates, the examples below are representative and anonymized, not literal descriptions of specific clients.
Capital Raise: Putting the Numbers Under Pressure Before the Investor Does. A mid-sized European manufacturer sought external capital to fund its expansion. Conversations with prospective investors had stalled, not for any lack of merit in the business, but because the financial materials contained inconsistencies that any serious institutional investor would eventually catch. The firm’s role was less about storytelling than discipline: cross-checking EBITDA across reporting periods, reconciling figures presented to different audiences, and rebuilding the financial narrative so that it would withstand scrutiny rather than simply impress on a first read.
Structured Finance: Negotiating From a Position Informed by Diligence. On a structured-finance mandate, the firm was engaged to negotiate the terms of a securitization transaction on behalf of a client. Before accepting those terms, it conducted its own diligence on the counterparty’s corporate history and standing, a step sometimes skipped under time pressure, but one that materially changed both the negotiating posture and the protections ultimately written into the contract.
Growth Equity: Walking a Founder Through the Discomfort of the Data Room. A growth-stage company preparing a bridge round ahead of a larger Series A engaged the firm to manage the fundraising process. Part of the mandate was an honest internal assessment of the company’s own readiness, flagging, before any investor could, the gaps between the metrics being presented and what the underlying data actually supported.
A Philosophy, Not a Sales Pitch
What emerges from these mandates is less a sales pitch than a working philosophy. White Family & Co. describes its role not as “closing deals,” but as protecting the integrity of a process for long enough that a good deal can come together on fair terms, and, just as often, advising a client to walk away from one that does not hold up.
It is a deliberately unfashionable approach in an industry that tends to reward speed and optimism over scrutiny. For a firm operating across distinct jurisdictions, legal systems and investment cultures, it is also the only sustainable one. Cross-border transactions fail more often from unexamined assumptions than from bad faith on either side, and the advisors who catch those assumptions in time are the ones clients come back to.
From a single founder’s conviction in 2023 to a cross-border firm trusted with complex mandates across four jurisdictions, White Family & Co. has built something rare: speed that does not cut corners, and ambition that still answers to scrutiny.
