O’Hara Administration, founded in 2014, describes its method plainly. The firm co-invests alongside institutional investors and European banks rather than competing with them for deals, according to O’Hara Financial. Alejandro Betancourt López built the vehicle to span energy, banking, consumer brands, and internet businesses.
The Auro transaction shows the model at work. Uber took a 30% minority stake for €220 million in February 2025, and the people who built the company kept day-to-day control.
What an Operator Brings to the Table
Capital is rarely the scarce ingredient in a deal. Sector knowledge smart resource planning, and the ability to run a business are harder to source, and that is what an operator-led firm offers a bank or fund that wants exposure without the staff to manage it directly. O’Hara positions itself as that partner: it takes stakes it can actively steer, rather than passive bets parked and left alone.
The structure also allows for patience. A family-office vehicle without redemption windows can hold a position through a long build, the kind of timeline the Auro license accumulation required before a buyer arrived. Few outside investors would have waited that long, which is part of why the position was available to acquire in the first place.
That patience shows up across the portfolio. Betancourt López sat on the board of Pacific Exploration & Production, the Canadian-listed oil and gas producer, in 2015 and 2016. His holdings include BDK Financial Group, the Luxembourg-incorporated company that runs Banque de Dakar in Senegal and won a banking license in Côte d’Ivoire in 2017, alongside positions in Easy Payment Gateway and the racquet-sports platform Playtomic. Energy, West African banking, payments, eyewear, mobility, and sports technology rarely sit in one portfolio, and moving across them takes operating range rather than a single sector playbook.
West African banking is the clearest example of the long-cycle bet the structure is built for. Building deposit franchises and securing licenses across two countries is slow, low-glamour work that a fund with a five-year clock would struggle to justify. A vehicle that answers to no redemption calendar can treat that timeline as an advantage instead of a problem, holding while the franchise compounds.
Why Institutions Take the Call
Institutions gain a specific thing here: an aligned operator who carries execution risk alongside them. A bank co-investing next to a firm that knows the sector lowers the odds of a deal stalling on operational missteps. Betancourt López’s network reaches financial centers from London to Geneva to New York, which widens the range of opportunities on offer and gives a co-investor confidence the deal flow is real.
The timing helps. Private-market dealmaking is expected to regain momentum in 2026 after a slower stretch, according to Bain & Company, and appetite for co-investment has been climbing as banks and funds look for fee-efficient ways into private deals. An operator who already holds assets and can run them makes a natural counterparty for that money, especially in sectors where local knowledge decides the outcome.
The broader money flows point the same direction. Limited partners have been pushing for more direct co-investment exposure, drawn by lower fees and a closer look at the underlying assets, and a wave of smaller family offices has entered the middle market with patient, low-leverage capital. A firm built to sit beside institutions, rather than to raise a blind pool and compete with them, is positioned for that demand rather than against it.
There is a discipline in the approach as well. By taking stakes it can influence and holding them on its own clock, O’Hara avoids the forced-seller problem that catches funds at the end of a vehicle’s life. The Auro permits took years to assemble and years more to prove out, and a buyer arrived only when the regulatory squeeze made regulated supply scarce. An investor with a deadline might have sold early; one without a deadline waited for the bid to come to him.
The Uber deal shows the appeal from the other side. A global company wanted regulated scale in Spain, and it wanted it quickly. Partnering with the operator who already held the assets beat building from zero, which is the case Alejandro Betancourt López makes for putting an operator beside institutional money rather than behind it. The bank brings the balance sheet. The operator brings the business. Both keep their strengths, and neither has to pretend to be the other.
The model also travels. The same logic that drew Uber into Auro applies to a fund weighing a payments platform, a West African bank, or an eyewear brand: the capital is interchangeable, but the operator who can run the asset is not. As more institutions chase direct exposure in 2026, the firms worth co-investing beside are the ones that can point to a deal already closed on those terms.
