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I sat down with Rob Heyvaert, Founder and Managing Partner of Motive Partners, a fintech-focused private equity firm with over $6Bn in AUM, 80 portfolio companies representing over $15 trillion of assets in the wealth management space.
Rob is a serial entrepreneur who started his first company at 24, sold it to IBM, and later founded Capco and sold to FIS to hundreds of millions of dollars, before launching Motive in 2016. He is a true fintech builder and it was inspiring to learn from him. We recorded this episode live at Motive’s NYC office as part of New York Fintech week.
Three Decades Building the Future of Finance
Rob Heyvaert’s career has a single through line, and he wrote it on a chalkboard one Friday afternoon in the early 1990s. The slogan was “forming the future of finance.” Three decades and three companies later, Motive Partners is still using it. His first company, Cimad, was a small Belgian engineering shop with ten engineers working on the Belgian stock exchange. They saw a newspaper RFP for a real-time settlement system for the Euro and responded. They approached IBM and asked to team up. IBM agreed, mostly because they assumed Cimad would never win. Nine months later, Cimad won the $1.4 billion contract, and nine years after founding Cimbad IBM bought the company. Rob then founded and built a much larger financial consulting business called Capco into a global giant with 15,000 alumni (as of 2026). Nine years after founding Capco he sold it to FIS. The connecting thread across all these companies is infrastructure: clearing and settlement at Cimad, advisory and infrastructure for financial institutions at Capco, and the infrastructure layer of finance at Motive.
When Rob started building and raising money money for Motive in 2015 and 2016, he was very clear that the world did not need another generic private equity or venture capital firm. His bet was that most investors over-indexed on capital and underwriting, and underweighted the operational and innovation skills that actually drive value creation in financial services. Motive was designed to bring three skills together: (i) investor, (ii) operator, (iii) innovator. His framework for a career has three horizons, learn, lead, coach. He believes investing is closer to coaching than leading, and that the difference between operating and investing is exponential. A single company is a linear bet. A platform that backs entrepreneurs at scale is not. Almost 10 years later, the firm has ~80 portfolio companies, of which 40 operate in the wealth management industry. Together, their wealth management portfolio companies manage or represent over $15 trillion of assets, organized around one common API layer and one common data structure. That structural specialization might just be Motive’s secret sauce.
The With Intelligence Playbook: Two Years, $1.8 Billion
One of the clearest proof points of Motive’s specialist model is the recent sale of With Intelligence to S&P for $1.8 billion, only two years after the original investment. Reports peg Motive’s July 2023 entry at a valuation of roughly $451 million, implying a money multiple of close to 4x in just over two years, though Motive has not publicly confirmed the exact return. The figure also does not reflect the additional capital deployed across the five or six tuck-in acquisitions that scaled the business during the hold period. With Intelligence is a UK-based provider of proprietary data and intelligence on hedge funds, private markets, and asset managers. When Motive bought the business, it sat at an inflection point between an event-driven model and a high-margin private data subscription business. Most investors saw the company as an event organizer. Motive saw a private markets data infrastructure company hiding inside an event organizer.
Motive bought the business and kept the founder Charlie. They executed five or six tuck-in acquisitions, scouted databases, strengthened the US market, and built the firm quarter by quarter. Separately, Motive had been in dialogue with S&P for months about S&P’s private markets ambitions. Eventually the two conversations came together. As Rob says: “valuation is a result of synergy, not the other way around.” The deal is a textbook example of how a specialist investor with operator depth and a strategic relationship with the eventual buyer can compress what is normally a five to seven year value creation cycle into 24 months.
The Finished Work Thesis: Why AI Is Bigger Than Better Software
Rob’s most provocative argument is about how AI will transoform financial services, and it cuts against the dominant narrative. Most people are focused on AI as a software efficiency layer, but Rob thinks that frame misses the point entirely.
His thesis, laid out in a recent Motive paper, is what he calls “finished work.” In financial services today, for every dollar a company spends, roughly $10 goes to human labor and $1 goes to software. Motive is betting that ratio is going to invert. The transformation will not come from anyone rebuilding a piece of software with Claude over a weekend. The software is 5% to 10% of the issue. The real prize is the sophisticated workflows that sit around the software and define how business actually gets done. How credit gets underwritten. How a private placement memorandum gets queried. How clearing and settlement actually function. The companies that win will be the ones that deliver finished work end to end at half the price it costs today, while still expanding profitability. The companies that lose are the ones that have no moat, because they can be replicated by anyone with access to a frontier model.
Rob is brutally honest that this is a long road. He references a top LLM CEO who said publicly that the bottleneck is not smarter Einsteins, it is the existing workflows and execution context that the models have to plug into. Rob thinks this will be a 10 year journey for financial services. He thinks we are still in the early innings, and that the leading institutions will eventually make bolder moves, switching off legacy systems and switching on new ones. Change is coming.
Why Infrastructure, Not Shiny Apps, Will Define Wealth Management
Wealth management is the single largest concentration in Motive’s portfolio, and Rob Heyvaert is crystal clear that the winning formula to win in asset management not necessarily in the front end. Despite years of fintech investment in user interfaces and consumer-facing apps, the back office of wealth management remains substantially manual. The plumbing has not been digitized and it’s one of the big reasons slowing down incumbents.
Motive’s bet is that fixing the infrastructure layer unlocks everything else. Execution, clearing, settlement, ALM, onboarding, positioning, and distribution have historically been built in silos by capital markets specialists who never looked at the workflow holistically. And that’s precisely what they’re doing in Motive’s wealth management portfolio. Just to name a few… InvestCloud is building the private markets network and BetaNXT is trailblazing in the full execution workflow of US clearing. The portfolio is structured so that 40 wealth-related companies sit on a common API layer and data structure. That structural integration compounds and would be hard to replicate for a generalist PE investor.
The Best Time to Be an Entrepreneur
Rob is genuinely convinced that this is the best time in history to be a builder. His view is that current market conditions and new technologies have put the entrepreneur back at the center. When he started his first company in the 1990s, he had to take a brutal personal-guarantee bank loan because no other capital existed. The US had not yet exported its venture capital culture to Europe, and he recalls signing paperwork that gave the bank the right to come and seize anything he owned (joke was on the bank, there was nothing to take). Today, capital is more accessible than ever, technology is almost limitless, and the barriers to building have collapsed. As Rob puts it, an idea worth backing can come from a 70-year-old or a 20-year-old, but more 20-year-olds are getting to that idea than ever before. The constraint is no longer money, infrastructure, or talent. The constraint is imagination and agency.
He is excited for Motive to back the next generation of ambitious founders, and what he looks for is consistent. He wants extreme conviction about a specific problem. He wants a true beginner’s mind, not someone doing what others already did, but someone reinventing a product or industry holistically. He wants an entrepreneur grounded enough to think about tomorrow while dreaming about many years out (holding both devils in their head at the same time). And he wants builders obsessed with speed and adoption, because in the current cycle, the gap between an idea and its execution is closing fast!
Book Recommendations
On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddias. Rob says this is a must-read. He says it covers what leadership means, what it means to go to war, what it means to build an empire, and why empires fall and succeed. He calls it phenomenal.
The Unfiltered Q&A with Rob Heyvaert
Miguel Armaza: You started your first business, Cimad, when you were 24. What drove that entrepreneurial spirit?
Rob Heyvaert: I am a dreamer, and I came from a very humble beginning. My mother was in big debt, and we couldn’t afford my study. So I said, I’m going to save my mother. She was on her own. My father had left us. That was a big drive. I also had a problem with authority, which I still have sometimes. It was very hard for me to listen to somebody I thought was either stupid or didn’t know what they were talking about. After the military, I’d been confronted with technology and got a passion for infrastructure. We saw a newspaper RFP for a real-time settlement system for the Euro. We were ten engineers at the Belgian stock exchange. We went to IBM and asked, would you want to team up? They said, sure, we’re never going to win, so use our paper. Nine months later we won the contract, a $1.4 billion contract. IBM said, what, we won? So we better buy you. So they bought us.
Miguel Armaza: You have a very strong work ethic. Does that come from growing up with a single mother, or did the military shape that?
Rob Heyvaert: It is my lack of balancing things, to be honest. There is no such thing as work-life balance for an entrepreneur. Your work is your life, and your life is your work. It is very hard for me to turn stuff off, and that is more my DNA than anything else. My life is Motive and my kids. But my kids know more about Motive than most Motive people.
Miguel Armaza: People have been trying to modernize the financial sector for the entire history of our industry. But something feels different today. What is it?
Rob Heyvaert: What is different is this unbelievably powerful result of years of research and building, and we have this technology called artificial intelligence. The original name of Motive was the Beginner’s Mind Collective. The beginner’s mind means being able to begin again and really redesign. We now have the technology to reinvent how we do finance, how we deal with money, and that’s never been so powerful. The old rules of looking at cash flows and projecting five to ten years are out the window. There is this notion that we have to begin again from scratch. In the Industrial Revolution, they started putting machines on shop floors and realized the shop floor was not designed to have those machines. I feel a bit the same way about AI. It is not just about one specific question or one specific skill. It is our ability to reinvent how we think and bridge between these powerful models and the reality that exists today. I have never been more bullish about it. I can imagine that we run some of these financial institutions with 5% of the people they have, with better customer service and better risk management.
Miguel Armaza: You believe this is the best time to be an entrepreneur, that the power has come back to the builder. How do you navigate that?
Rob Heyvaert: The entrepreneur is back at the center. The power of getting a team that can execute is so amazing. Everything is getting democratized. These models are so powerful. An idea can come from somebody who is 70 or somebody who is 20, but there are more people at 20 with ideas who have no barriers. When I started my business, there was no capital. It was impossible to get capital. I went to a bank and signed up with a horrible loan where they could come and get everything. There was nothing to get, so I said, that’s a good trade. The US does this so well. They have venture capital. Thirty-five years ago, that wasn’t even the case. Now venture capital is easy to get, and the way to start businesses is so much easier in the sense of democratization. With the models out there, it is in your own imagination.
Miguel Armaza: In your report, there is this 10-to-1 ratio in financial services. For every dollar a company spends, $10 go to labor and $1 to software. You are betting that inverts?
Rob Heyvaert: We call it finished work. You have to have moats. You have to be sure you don’t have something that I can just ask Claude to go do. There are sophisticated workflows sitting around the software assets. We believe the holistic transformation will let us deliver finished work at half the price it is done today, and still massively increase profitability for the companies that go on that wave. The opposite is true for the people who lose, because they don’t have the moat. Somebody can redo a piece of software over the weekend with Claude. That is 5% of the issue. The real issue is it is embedded in a workflow. It is how we do business. It is how we underwrite credit. All the functions financial services do, reinvent that as a holistic finished work. I think you will be able to pick service providers who deliver finished work A to Z, plug into financial institutions, and adoption will be much faster. We have not seen anything yet when it comes to that.
Miguel Armaza: Sequoia has this thing where they ask every partner to define the type of company they like to back, the “Rob company” in this case. How would you describe the type of entrepreneur and company you like to work with?
Rob Heyvaert: Somebody on the entrepreneur side with an extreme level of conviction about what she or he is passionate about. The mortgage industry, for example, has been done a certain way for a very long time. We need somebody who says, I have this conviction, this is how I think, this is what I need. We need somebody with tremendous conviction and a truly beginner’s mind. Not somebody who says I am going to do the same thing somebody else did, but somebody who really reinvents something holistically. He or she also needs help in the sense of scaling and thinking through stuff. We love to be involved, not to police anybody. Give them wings, let them do stuff faster. It’s all about speed and adoption. We also like when people believe themselves that the end state is amazing but they have incremental capability to get there. It is unbelievably powerful when somebody can be grounded and think about tomorrow and dream about two years out, holding those two devils in their head at the same time.
Miguel Armaza: When you reflect on your pre-Motive days as a founder, what were the critical mistakes you made that you often talk about with founders and your team?
Rob Heyvaert: Not being a good listener. And not embracing mentors. I am a believer in mentors. I still have several today for myself. I should have been a better listener. I was a pretty good communicator. But you learn from your failures, not from your success. I think success is very dangerous. The tweaking we did to become successful came from our failures, not the other way around. The other thing is believing in other people. Everybody is a different entrepreneur. Somebody can build amazing software over a weekend and on Monday be successful. That is not me. I am more of a connector. My strength is the ability to bring amazing people around the table around a common vision. The authoritarian founder who knows everything and goes against the tide is not what I would support. It is the opposite. It is empowering people to surround themselves with great people. Looking back, I have also learned to become much more patient.
Miguel Armaza: What is driving the customer obsession in financial services? Nigel Morris talks about how inconvenience drives customers to stay with their bank. Now banks are feeling the pressure from fintechs that were tiny eight years ago.
Rob Heyvaert: It is the vengeance. This industry has lived and still lives off inefficiency. The middleman still makes a tremendous amount of money, and the middleman is anybody sitting between an actual transaction and a value creation event involving money or payments. I am glad this is a pendulum that goes back and forth. Innovation is interesting. When do you see it? It is too late. You always dismiss innovation as not applicable to you, because you have distribution, infrastructure, trust, risk. Then slowly but surely, players like Revolut and Robinhood become massive, because they built something assessed by clients, unencumbered by legacy. Most financial institutions, 70% of their money goes to maintenance. Some goes to 80%. Having a white piece of paper today is powerful. It is adapt, adapt, adapt or die.
Miguel Armaza: You sold With Intelligence to S&P for $1.8 billion only two years after your original investment. Did the thesis materialize quicker than you expected?
Rob Heyvaert: It was the perfect situation for us. A founder, Charlie, who was open and a great listener, who had built a very cool company. Some people saw an event organization. With Intelligence organizes events for investors in the UK and gives prices to the best hedge funds. They have journalists, they collect data, and they build proprietary data sources you can subscribe to. They were on a journey to go from event-driven to journalistic capability to private data sources. We told them, we like your company, we like Charlie. He understood what it took to make his quarter, and he could dream big. We bought the whole business, kept the founder, took everybody else out, and went dark. We built the firm with him quarter after quarter. We bought five or six companies over two years. Separately, we had a relationship with S&P, which is a phenomenal company, and we understood they wanted to be more aggressive in private markets. No other firm could have that conversation. As a strategic participant, we partnered with S&P about their future in private markets. That ongoing dialog was decoupled from With Intelligence. At one point, the two came together. We spent six months thinking through how it should go. It was hugely synergetic for them. Valuation is a result of synergy, not the other way around. Valuations are simple. They are discounted cash flows going forward. The higher the confidence, the lower the discount rate. The more synergetic capability, the higher the probability. Now with Claude, it really pops out, because you don’t have to do anything.
Miguel Armaza: You have said shiny apps matter less in wealth management. What really matters is infrastructure. How does infrastructure get transformed these days?
Rob Heyvaert: A leading LLM model provider’s CEO sat on stage and said, I don’t need more Einsteins from you. Go for it. If you can build models that have Einsteins, that is powerful. But my problem is not that you have a smarter model. My problem is this all works in the context of existing workflows and existing execution. If you go back to wealth management, we may talk about shiny objects, but in reality we are still querying a private placement memorandum from uptown to downtown and back. So you think wealth management is digitized? No way. The complexity from the product manufacturing and the execution side is massive. The problem is not the shiny. It is the plumbing underneath. That can be solved. It is not rocket science. We believe if we fix the infrastructure, you can build amazing stuff. Our $15 trillion in wealth management is execution, clearing, settlement. Everybody has always looked at this in silos. Step up and say, what if we reinvented everything? We have InvestCloud working on the private markets network. We have BetaNXT, which is trailblazing in the full execution workflow in the US. There is a lot of work between the Einstein models and the reality. It is day and night. I don’t think it happens in 18 months. I think it is a 10-year journey. The Databricks CEO said it nicely.
Miguel Armaza: What is the role of the retail investor going forward?
Rob Heyvaert: It is a controversial topic. Somebody said, if the retail investor comes in, I am getting out. I would argue the opposite. Everything is getting democratized. The retail investor is starting to get access to really sophisticated products they couldn’t get before. We are going to see a revolution. What people don’t understand is that already today, you can have $1,000 and access what used to require $50 or $100 million. That is a trend all over the world. Warren Buffett says it nicely. My neighbor lives off $100,000 but has better electricity than Rockefeller had when he was a billionaire. There is this constant rising of infrastructure that’s available to more people. The retail investor will have access. They are still going to need proper advice, because trust is going to be super key. It will be very hard for people to judge what these products mean. Education around that is going to be super important. You saw that one press article, and suddenly private credit is horrible and everybody pulls back. We have a long way to go through education and protection. Regulators have a role to play too.
Miguel Armaza: Does branding for companies become more important than ever in this retail era?
Rob Heyvaert: Brand and trust are coming together. The brand represents that trust. Absolutely. That is the biggest thing some of these legacy players have going for themselves. I remember sitting with the CEO of one of the largest investment banks, and he was talking about retail people coming into private markets. He said, wait until something bad happens, and watch how they quit us out as quickly as they came in. The notion of having a trusted brand that does things in your interest is absolutely key, and it is going to be complex, but fascinating.
Miguel Armaza: Your exits have been multi-billion dollar exits. How would you describe your relationship with wealth and money?
Rob Heyvaert: It is interesting and very personal. I had my first liquidity event when I was 27. The first thing I did was buy a house for my mother and put people around her, because she had worked her whole life. That gave me tremendous satisfaction. I realized then that it would be ridiculous for me to assume I would live this life of luxury without doing things for other people, and it starts with your own surroundings. The power of getting liquidity early is that you realize you can do things with it. So very early on, I decided to live a great life and have a family and have kids, but at the same time to do well. I want to be private about it, but I think if you don’t do that, it is a very selfish situation. I sometimes worry we lose the power that exists in understanding that wealth is not about self-promotion or how rich you can be. It is about responsibility. That is what I like about America. People like Michael Dell wrote checks at a level that is phenomenal. We should shame everybody who has wealth and is not doing something. In Belgium, where I am from, there is less wealth, of course, and giving is much more private. I prefer the discreet giving. No buildings carved in stone.
Miguel Armaza: Most memorable Motive moment?
Rob Heyvaert: First close of the first fund. The hardest thing professionally is not to start a company. It is not to find capital. It is to wake up one day in your 40s and say, we are going to build a private equity firm. This is the vision. These are the people. Look at what we did together. Then you sit in front of an LP and they say, can I get your track record please? Yeah, but it is an operational track, not an investor track. Schwarzman put it in his book at Blackstone. The hardest thing he has done is raise his first fund. The first close at 401 Broadway was phenomenal. The second best moment is that those same investors who came into the first fund became the first closer in our next fund. It is naive to think everything always goes well. Look at the cycles we have gone through over the last 10 years, from abundance to nobody putting capital to work to suddenly having technology nobody saw coming. The advice I would give everybody is, it is important you get better. You get better through experience, through failures and successes, but more importantly, through having the empathy to learn from others.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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