Since our firm’s inception, Robert leads the activities of Fintex Capital as Chief Executive.
Rob is a veteran investor in alternative credit. His involvement in marketplace lending started as early as 2007, which is when the Fintech industry was born. At the time, Rob invested in a young German fintech start-up, auxmoney GmbH, as an early-stage seed investor. For the next 7 years, Rob actively participated in growing the company and shaping its nascent marketplace for consumer loans. Today, auxmoney is continental Europe’s largest online lender, having given birth to well in excess of €2 billion worth of loans. Since 2016 Fintex is the only multi-institutional investor on auxmoney’s marketplace for loans, having purchased receivables originated by auxmoney for in excess of €250 million.
Prior to this, Robert worked at JPMorgan and JPMorgan Cazenove in Investment Banking for close to a decade with a focus on Debt and Equity Capital Markets. In 2007, he also co-founded Excellion Capital, a successful London-based merchant banking boutique combining real estate debt advisory with principal investments.
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Fintex today manages $130m across German consumer loans, US consumer loans and UK property loans. It only manages institutional funds, and in property lending it always lends its own money alongside its investors’, on a subordinated basis.
The firm uses Luxembourg securitisation vehicles because Luxembourg regulation is favourable to investors.
Robert is very much of the opinion that UK property is a multi-faceted asset class – a ‘massive market’ that could be sliced and diced in many different ways.
Fintex’s ‘trick’ to earning premium returns without taking undue risk is essentially to provide an extra layer of oversight over a partner lender’s due diligence processes, through the use of technology, to ensure that all the right questions have been asked of a borrower. At the end of the underwriting process, Robert thinks Fintex can identify exactly why a borrower would have been rejected by a bank, and can then determine whether that borrower remains bankable.
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21st September 2021 | Oliver Smith
3rd August 2021 | Aisling Finn