A seasoned global CEO with three decades of experience in financial services, wealth management and investment management — bringing apex-level institutional standing to the founding of Novi Education.
Francesco De Ferrari is a seasoned global CEO with over thirty years of experience in financial services, wealth management and investment management. His career has been defined by establishing, growing and transforming businesses across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America — a multi-regional operating profile that few financial leaders accumulate in a single career.
He last served as CEO of Global Wealth Management at Credit Suisse Group AG, where he led one of the world’s largest wealth franchises, and concurrently as interim CEO of region EMEA. During this period he was also a member of Credit Suisse Group AG’s Executive Board — the institutional level at which one of the world’s most established global financial groups was strategically run.
Before Credit Suisse, Francesco built and scaled wealth and asset management businesses across the Asia-Pacific region — a phase of his career that shaped his conviction that the Asian markets would, over the following decade, become the centre of gravity for global education and talent investment.
The decision to co-found Novi Education rests on a precise reading of the moment. The rise of generative artificial intelligence is, in Francesco’s analysis, relocating economic value away from the production of content and towards the authority of the institutions behind it — a structural shift that creates the conditions for an entirely new generation of education companies, built on partnership rather than on content output.
As Co-CEO, Francesco leads Novi alongside Valter Spano, with primary responsibility for the dimensions of the company where strategic direction, institutional capital, and the development of the Asian markets converge.
Francesco leads the strategic direction of Novi Education and the architecture of its institutional capital base. His three decades at the apex of global wealth management bring to the company a depth of relationship with institutional investors, family offices and strategic partners that very few early-stage education companies can access. The conversations through which Novi’s strategic capital is structured — present and future — pass through this dimension of his work.
The Asian markets represent, in Novi’s strategy, the medium-term centre of gravity of the company’s expansion. Francesco leads the institutional engagement with the region — drawing on a career of building and growing financial businesses across Asia-Pacific, and on the institutional relationships accumulated in three decades of operating in the region. The conversations through which Novi enters new Asian markets are coordinated through this leadership dimension.
Francesco oversees the governance of Novi’s portfolio of programmes — present and in development — and the relationship with the institutional partners that anchor each programme. From Space Center Houston for Moonshot through to the leading universities, reference hospitals and globally iconic brands engaged in Novi’s pipeline, the governance of these partnerships at board level falls within Francesco’s responsibility.
The full team includes founders, advisors and operations – discover everyone on the team page.
