Din Mustaffa was recently promoted to head of strategic ventures at UK-based financial technology provider FNZ Group and helps develop a more structured approach towards making strategic venture investments.
FNZ is backed by General Atlantic, a US-based private equity firm, and focuses on fintech within the wealth and asset management sector with approximately $450bn assets under administration and around 1,500 employees. “FNZ is mainly interested in opportunities across verticals within the wealth management sector,” said Mustaffa.
FNZ’s chief executive Adrian Durham added: “As a global fintech business with over 1,500 employees and £350bn ($450bn) in assets managed for over seven million retail investors, maintaining the same pace of innovation across our whole platform, becomes increasingly challenging.
“To address this challenge, and ensure innovation remains a strong driver of growth, FNZ created a strategic ventures division in early 2018, and hired Din Mustaffa to head it. Since joining, Din has overseen a wide range of strategic investments on behalf of the company, ranging from startups to established businesses, that either add product and service capability or geographic expansion to FNZ’s business. Din has been able to rapidly identify the right opportunities, build strong relationships with entrepreneurs, and structure deals that meet the interests of all parties. He has also ensured for the less mature companies, that they receive the support that helps them to aggressively grow, leveraging FNZ’s wider platform as required.”
Founded as a startup in New Zealand in 2004, FNZ moved its headquarters to Edinburgh, Scotland in 2012. Its customers include Aegon, Aviva, Barclays, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Lloyds, M&G, Quilter, RBC, Santander, Standard Life Aberdeen, UBS, Vanguard and Zurich.
Mustaffa is responsible for planning and executing worldwide mergers and acquisitions (M&A), corporate development, investments and other strategic ventures for the group. He also leads and manages end-to-end deal process including coordination between various parties and advisory teams.
He said: “FNZ is round and maturity-agnostic, we are able to invest and acquire any business that meets our strategic priorities.”
Among the feats realised in 2018, Mustaffa is especially proud of FNZ’s acquisition of Germany-based financial institution Ebase – European Bank for Financial Services – from Germany-based online bank Comdirect for €151m ($168m) in July. He also oversaw the sale of FNZ to Canada-based institutional investor Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and UK-based financial services consultancy Generation at an enterprise value of $2.2bn. Several M&A and venture deals are currently under way.
Mustaffa helped create more structure around venture portfolio investment management as well as synergies by permitting portfolio companies to work with each other.
Regarding the relationship with the portfolio companies, Mustaffa said: “We have the preferred right to acquire most of our portfolio companies and may be in the process [in February 2019] of acquiring one of our portfolio companies. Most of our portfolio companies’ services are marketed together with FNZ’s core offerings as one package, and in certain regions, these services play an important role in attracting new clients to use the FNZ platform. Staff at FNZ and our portfolio companies tend to work together closely across the entire organisation to deliver our combined technology and asset servicing proposition.”
Concerning the investment strategy, Mustaffa said: “FNZ continues to review opportunities to make investments consistent with its strategic objectives, including to enter new regional markets and distribution channels.”
Before joining FNZ Group in 2018, Mustaffa had been at UK-based accountancy firm Grant Thornton’s M&A corporate finance department for a year, having joined from UK-based accountancy firm Jeffreys Henry’s audit and equity capital market corporate finance division where he spent a year and a half. Before that, Mustaffa had worked for UK-based financial services company Flemmings for four years.
Mustaffa holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance with first-class honours from University of Exeter. He also has a certificate in investment, risk and taxation awarded by Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment and is a chartered accountant.
