Motive Partners

Rob Heyvaert wrote his investment thesis on a chalkboard in the early 1990s. The slogan was "forming the future of finance." He was running a small Belgian engineering firm at the time, working on the Belgian stock exchange. Three companies, two exits, and thirty-plus years later, Motive Partners uses the same phrase — not because it is still marketing, but because it was never marketing to begin with. It was a description of what the firm's founder has spent his entire professional life actually doing.

Motive Partners, launched in 2016, is a specialist private investment firm focused exclusively on the technology layer that underpins financial services. Its five primary subsectors — Banking & Payments, Capital Markets, Data & Analytics, Investment Management, and Insurance — are not a portfolio diversification strategy. They are the operating system of the global financial system, largely invisible to the public, largely underinvested by generalist private equity, and the subject of an asymmetric knowledge advantage that the Motive team has been building for decades. The firm manages $6.4 billion across two investment programs: Motive Capital, its private equity strategy, and Motive Ventures, its early-stage vehicle. Motive Create — the firm's innovation and value creation arm — employs former operators, product specialists, and regulatory experts who work inside portfolio companies rather than advising from the outside.

The portfolio's concentration in wealth management infrastructure reflects a specific and durable thesis: that the back office of wealth management, still substantially manual despite decades of fintech investment in consumer-facing interfaces, represents one of the largest value creation opportunities remaining in financial services. Execution, clearing, settlement, onboarding, and distribution have been built in silos by capital markets specialists who never looked at the workflow holistically. Motive is looking at it holistically. Fund II closed at $2.5 billion in 2022, generating a reported 40% IRR across both funds since inception. Fund III is currently in market.

With 160 professionals across New York and London and portfolio companies collectively managing more than $15 trillion in client assets, Motive Partners occupies a position in fintech private equity that is, by design, impossible to replicate quickly.