T.J. Della Pietra joined Star Mountain Capital as a senior advisor. Star Mountain’s senior advisors and operating partners align with the company’s full-time team and investors by investing their personal capital and sharing in the firm’s carried interest.

“We are happy to add to our advisory network another veteran senior executive with more than 35 years of leadership, strategic, investment and governance experience in the financial industry,” Brett Hickey, founder and CEO of Star Mountain Capital, said. “As an aligned senior advisor, T. J. will assist with developing and implementing best practices across a wide range of activities to help maximize and protect value for all Star Mountain stakeholders.”

“Star Mountain brings large-market expertise, capital and capabilities to the lower middle market,” Della Pietra said. “I am thrilled to be working with an established and growing firm that is purpose-built to capitalize on the market inefficiencies of the large and fragmented lower middle market.”

Della Pietra has held several senior operating roles at Citigroup with responsibility for strategy, profit and loss, balance sheet, risk management, stakeholder relationships and people for complex businesses undergoing significant transformations. Most recently, he was global head of Citi Holdings, where he led a significant reduction in the size and complexity of the business unit responsible for managing Citigroup’s non-core consumer and institutional businesses and assets in the United States and overseas. Prior to that role, Della Pietra served as CEO for Citigroup in Japan, based in Tokyo, where he led the successful divestiture of Citi’s local consumer businesses and the multi-year restructuring of the local operating platform for Citi’s institutional business. Before that, Della Pietra served as chief operating officer and chief investment officer for Citi in Japan.

Earlier in his career, Della Pietra served in divisional general counsel roles at both Citigroup and J.P. Morgan, where he gained experience handling strategic, regulatory, compliance, governance, litigation and investigation matters and managing legal and compliance teams.

Della Pietra began his legal career at Davis Polk & Wardwell, where his practice focused on banking and finance, capital markets, funds and investment management, bankruptcies and restructurings and corporate governance.

Star Mountain Capital is a specialized investment manager with more than $3 billion in assets under management focused exclusively on investing in established, private small and medium-sized businesses in the North American lower middle market.