Who we are
Principal-led. Relationship-driven. Built for execution.
UMCI OÜ is a private advisory firm working on cross-border commercial and financial transactions for clients who require structured solutions rather than generic advice.
We are deliberately small. Mandates are led by a principal, not delegated down a pyramid, and the person a client meets at the outset is the person accountable at completion. Where a mandate requires specialist capability — legal, tax, technical, financial modelling, surveying, planning — we appoint and manage that capability ourselves rather than asking the client to assemble it.
The firm is built on forty years of commercial and advisory experience spanning operational leadership, consultancy and investment structuring. That combination matters. Transaction structuring is not a theoretical exercise, and the difference between a structure that looks correct and one that works is almost always operational.
We do not name clients, transactions or counterparties.
Not on this website, not in a pitch, and not in conversation with anyone outside the mandate.
Most advisory firms establish credibility by publishing the work. We cannot, and would not if we could. Clients engage UMCI precisely because a transaction is sensitive — a family restructuring, an acquisition that must not move a price, a jurisdiction change that would be misread if it surfaced early. A firm that converted last year's confidences into this year's marketing would be the wrong firm for that work.
What we will do is describe how we think, how a mandate runs, and where the boundaries sit. Everything on this site is written to be verifiable in a conversation rather than impressive on a page. Prospective clients who want reassurance about capability are welcome to test it directly: bring us a live problem and judge the quality of the response. That has always been a more reliable signal than a case study, and it is the only one we offer.
Leadership
Paul Sherman
Founder and Principal
Paul's career moved from running businesses to structuring the transactions that reshape them.
Before founding UMCI, Paul spent fifteen years in retail leadership and two decades in commercial consultancy — disciplines that teach the same lesson from different directions: a structure is only as good as its behaviour under pressure. That experience is the reason UMCI approaches structuring the way it does. A holding structure has to be banked. An SPV has to be governed, reported and eventually unwound. A consortium has to survive a disagreement between participants three years after the documents were signed. Structures designed without operating experience tend to be elegant on the first day and expensive on every day after.
The second part of his career applied that perspective to cross-border transactions and capital deployment: designing the vehicles, coordinating the institutions, managing the professional advisers, and holding the timetable together while several counterparties in several jurisdictions each work to their own. His background across finance, operations and commercial property means he is generally the only person in the room who has sat on each side of the table the transaction requires.
He works directly with principals, family offices and corporate boards. He leads every UMCI mandate personally, and he is the person a client speaks to when something goes wrong at eleven o'clock at night — which, on transactions of this kind, is when the significant conversations tend to happen.
What he is good at
Reading a transaction three moves ahead and identifying the point at which it will break. Holding a timetable across parties who have no incentive to hurry. Translating between banking, legal, tax and commercial perspectives when each is speaking a different language about the same problem. Telling a client that an objective is achievable but not in the form they have described it — early, when that is still useful.
The bio above names nothing and no one, by design.
Method
We act as the central coordination point.
On any mandate, UMCI takes responsibility for:
A deliberately small core, with a deep bench behind it. UMCI draws on a long-established multidisciplinary network assembled over four decades — banking institutions, legal advisers, notaries, tax advisers, surveyors, escrow providers, financial modellers and specialist consultants across Europe and internationally, spanning finance, real estate, cross-border legal and tax, corporate structuring, due diligence and commercial analysis. Where a mandate benefits from capability we do not hold in-house, we appoint it, manage it and remain accountable for it. A mandate has the depth of a far larger firm behind it, and the client still deals with one person.
Confidential
Discretion is a condition of the work, not a marketing claim. Client identities, transaction details and structures are not disclosed, referenced or used as case studies.
Principal-led
Senior involvement from first conversation to final account. No handover to a junior team once the mandate is signed.
Structured for execution
Advice that cannot be implemented is not advice. Every engagement is scoped with completion in mind.