Senior Team

Robert leads the activities of Excellion Capital as Chief Executive.

In this role, Robert successfully managed the firm’s transition in 2013 from a firm principally focused on providing advice to clients to a fully-fledged merchant bank. Since then Excellion has been successfully combining client-driven corporate finance advisory with proprietary principal investing. Under his stewardship, the Excellion team created its first proprietary, discretionary investment fund in 2013 which was followed in 2015 by the creation of Fintex Capital.

Robert grew up in Germany and graduated from Law School at the University of Cologne. Whilst at university he launched his first successful start-up venture. As such, Excellion Capital is a natural continuation of his entrepreneurial desire. Prior to founding Excellion in late 2007, Robert spent close to a decade at JPMorgan and JPMorgan Cazenove in Investment Banking, M&A and Equity Capital Markets. At JPMorgan, he gained significant expertise advising corporates and private equity firms on capital markets and M&A transactions. This included large-scale IPO’s and capital raisings for a number of UK and international companies on stock exchanges in the UK (Main Board LSE and AIM), Germany, Poland, India, Kazakhstan and other markets. Robert was an integral part of the team that led companies such as Xstrata PLC, Vedanta PLC, TVN SA, Kazakhmys PLC and Nikanor PLC and others to immensely successful IPO’s.

Robert’s pre-Excellion work includes a long list of M&A and capital markets transactions including a $2.5 billion follow-on offering for Xstrata, which earned the 2006 IFR Award for European Deal of the Year; the $12.9 billion merger between BHP and Billiton to form BHP Billiton PLC, a successful $19bn hostile takeover of Falconbridge Ltd. (Canada) by Xstrata PLC, the successful M&A defence for Gold Fields from a hostile $8.3bn bid by Harmony Gold, Xstrata’s $5.5 billion rights issue (at the time, as the largest-ever capital raising in the UK), and several other landmark transactions.

As early stage investor and long-term adviser since 2007, Robert also played an important role in helping to grow auxmoney GmbH. Under the stewardship of its CEO, Excellion Co-Founder Raffael Johnen, auxmoney has become Continental Europe’s largest peer-to-peer lending business. Robert’s active involvement in the peer-to-peer lending arena started in 2007 when alternative credit platforms where still a very novel and new idea few people believed in. Robert remained active in this sector which in 2015 led him to establish Fintex Capital, one of the first investment firms in Europe dedicated to alternative credit.