Gulf capital in Europe: Alan Talib at the European Private Wealth Excellence Forum, Athens
Posts from July and September 2026 · 4 min read
The event
| Event | European Private Wealth Excellence Forum, organised by Smart Bridges |
| Where and when | Athens, September 2026 |
| Session | Fireside chat on Gulf capital in Europe, moderated by Gregg Robins |
| NordGulf Alliance | Alan Talib, CEO and Founder, with Dr Ahmed Talib |
Before the forum
Truly humbled to be joining the European Private Wealth Excellence Forum in Athens this September as a speaker, and real credit to the Smart Bridges Finance & Investing team for building a stage where family offices, advisors and allocators genuinely connect with each other.
The topic of our fireside chat could not be more timely. Gulf capital in Europe has changed shape. The big sovereigns, ADIA at $993B, Mubadala at $385B, QIA at $526B, increasingly sit behind co-investment structures and partnership stakes rather than the London trophy purchases and control buyouts of the last thirty years. In the first half of 2026 alone, Gulf sovereign funds committed $53.9B across 108 transactions, a record semester, and most of it landed in developed markets as partnership capital.
Sources: Mubadala, 9 April 2026 (385 billion dollars). Global SWF, first-half 2026 report, reported by The National, 1 July 2026 (record 53.9 billion dollars).
Dr. Gregg Robins reads this landscape as well as anyone, and I am very much looking forward to the conversation.
Humbled and grateful to be invited as a speaker at this year's @European Private Wealth Excellence Forum. Thank you, Dora Andreis and the Smart Bridges GmbH team, for the warm introduction and for the trust.
I'll be speaking about the next phase of Gulf capital in Europe. The story is changing: less about trophy assets, more about direct, selective and collaborative investment. It's a shift we see up close at NordGulf Alliance, and there's a lot worth discussing.
What I look forward to most, though, are the conversations around the sessions. Events like this bring together people who are shaping these capital flows in practice, and that exchange is where the real value lies.
On the day
Dora Andreis and the Smart Bridges team captured Day 1 better than I could. This was the room I spoke in.
My session turned to the Gulf and Europe, and to the part of cross-border investment that rarely makes the agenda: the realities underneath the capital, not the headline size of it.
What stayed with me was the mix in the room. Private markets, compliance, family capital, and people actually trying to read the other side rather than sell to it.
Thank you to Gregg Robins for moderating, and to Dora Andreis and Smart Bridges Finance & Investing for building something that felt like a conversation, not a conference.
Afterwards
Athens has a way of reminding you that the oldest business in the world is trust.
I was there to speak at the #EuropeanPrivateWealthExcellenceForum, and I left thinking less about what was said from the stage and more about the room it was said in. It was small. It was chosen with care. And somewhere between the first coffee and the last dinner, a group of strangers quietly stopped behaving like strangers.
That is rarer than it sounds. Most rooms of this kind are built for exchange. Cards out, pitch ready, one eye already on the door. This one was built for something slower. People arrived as titles and left as names. Geneva, Amsterdam, Brussels, Tallinn, Cairo, Madrid, the Gulf and Hong Kong, all of it folded into a few days of conversation you cannot schedule and cannot fake.
I have spent twenty years moving between the sand dunes and the fjords, and the lesson keeps repeating itself. Capital follows relationships, not the other way around.
And it showed. I came home with more than good memories. Several of those conversations are already turning into real work, in markets I have wanted to build in for years. That is the true measure of a room. Not the cards you collect, but the ones you go on to call.
None of this happens by accident. It is the quiet craft of Dora Andreis and the Smart Bridges GmbH team, the people behind the Wealth Summit. They do not just fill a room, they build one. What they made in Athens felt less like a conference and more like a family gathering that happened to be full of remarkable people. Thank you for that.
To Gregg Robins, who moderated with such grace, the steak in London still stands. And to everyone I met, it was an honour.
For Nordic and European wealth managers, the message of the session was practical: Gulf capital is arriving as a partner, and the managers who are structured to co-invest alongside it will see it first.