Company Merchant Banking • Profile
The Bank That Would Rather Have One Client Than a Hundred
Founded by dealmakers who left Morgan Stanley and TPG, Incentrum Group built a merchant bank around a contrarian idea - take fewer clients, own the advice, and put your own money where your counsel is.
Wall Street is built on a simple growth reflex: win more clients, close more deals, climb the league tables. Incentrum Group, a merchant bank tucked into 410 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, was designed to do close to the opposite. It courts a short list of corporate clients, sticks with them for years, and puts its own capital into the same industries it advises. The firm is small - roughly 22 people - but its partners carry a combined resume that runs through Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and TPG Capital, and, by the firm's own accounting, more than a trillion dollars of transactions.
That combination - independent advice and principal investing under one roof - is what the word "merchant bank" is supposed to mean. It is also, increasingly, a rarity. Incentrum was founded in 2017 by Lars Andersson and Geoffrey Fink, two senior dealmakers who had spent their careers inside far larger institutions and decided the model needed rebuilding from the studs. The result is a firm whose main selling point is not scale, but restraint.
The foundersTwo dealmakers who walked away from the giants
Andersson had been Vice Chairman of M&A and Head of Healthcare Investment Banking for the Americas at Morgan Stanley, after a run at JPMorgan as Global Head of Healthcare and Chemical Industry M&A and, before that, a seat at Goldman Sachs. He has been an investment banker since 1993, with deep roots in healthcare, life sciences, agriculture, and materials.
Fink came from the investing side. He spent two decades in private equity, including a stint as Head of Eurasia at TPG Capital - where he ran the Moscow office - and, most recently, as Managing Partner and Head of Investments at Delta Partners, a TMT-focused advisory and investment firm. His earlier stops included Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co., and Security Capital Group. Between them, the two founders hold degrees from Harvard, Yale, and the Fletcher School.
"Incentrum was founded as a true partnership in order to attract the best investment banking and private equity professionals for the benefit of the firm's clients." Incentrum Group
The modelAdvise and invest, on purpose
Incentrum runs on two lines of business that are meant to feed each other. On one side sits a full advisory practice: mergers and acquisitions, capital allocation, valuation, corporate defense, shareholder relations, strategic financial analysis, financing, capital markets advice, and fairness opinions. On the other sits a private-equity arm that sources deals, executes them, and works to improve the companies it buys - often alongside institutional co-investors.
Advisory side
Long-term strategic financial advisor to a select group of corporate clients and their boards - M&A, capital markets, valuation, and defense. Fee-based, relationship-driven, positioned as conflict-free.
Principal side
Private-equity investing in the same target industries, using the firm's own and institutional partners' capital. The advisory relationships become a source of proprietary deal flow.
The logic is that deep, durable relationships in a handful of sectors generate ideas and deal flow that a transactional, high-volume bank never sees. Because Incentrum is not trying to be on every side of every deal, it argues it can offer advice without the conflicts that come with a sprawling client book. That is a claim many boutiques make; Incentrum's structural answer is simply to keep the client list short enough that it holds up.
A few industries, known cold
Incentrum does not spread itself across the whole economy. It concentrates on sectors where its partners and advisors already know the operators, the boards, and the balance sheets: healthcare, life and material sciences, technology, industrials, and aerospace and defense. The bet is that sector depth beats sector breadth - that being the person a healthcare board already trusts is worth more than a wider but shallower network.
A four-star admiral walks into a boutique
For a 22-person firm, Incentrum's advisory roster reads unusually large. Its senior advisors include retired four-star Admiral James Stavridis, who spent four years as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander and later served as Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts; John Dowdy, who led McKinsey's global aerospace and defense practice for decades; David Bills, a former DuPont strategy chief and long-time McKinsey partner; and Rick Farnell, a technology executive and former CEO of data-security firm Protegrity.
The internal partnership is stocked in the same register - names like Tomer Regev, Michael McIvor, Nils Krahe, and Andrew Dechet, alongside Christopher Ziebarth, the firm's Partner, General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer, who arrived after roles as General Counsel at Kerzner International and a partnership at law firm Kirkland & Ellis. The point of the bench is reach: a small team that can pick up the phone to people who ran armies, industries, and companies.
"Independent, intellectually honest, client-focused advice based on experience, insight and rigorous analytics." The firm's stated philosophy
On the recordWhat it has actually done
Incentrum keeps a low public profile - it is not a firm that issues a press release for every mandate. Two moments are on the record. In 2018, an equity consortium led by Incentrum announced a reported $85 million investment in HyperSat, a venture building high-resolution hyperspectral imaging satellites. And in 2019, founders Andersson and Fink joined the board of directors of Protegrity, the data-security company. The firm is a member of FINRA and SIPC.
Where it sits in the market
Incentrum lives in the same neighborhood as the independent advisory shops that have taken share from the bulge brackets - PJT Partners, Moelis, Centerview, Evercore, Perella Weinberg, Lazard. Those firms sell independence and senior attention too. What sets Incentrum apart is the second engine: most pure advisors do not also invest their own capital as principals, and most mid-market private-equity firms do not run a full corporate-advisory practice. Incentrum is deliberately trying to be both, for a narrow set of clients, in a narrow set of industries.
Whether that scarcity model scales is an open question - by design, it is not built to. But for a board in healthcare or defense that wants an advisor with skin in the game and no competing agenda, the pitch is coherent: fewer clients, deeper relationships, and a firm that would genuinely rather have one than a hundred.