Czech fintech founder Adam Šoukal sells company again, stays on

The founder of the Brno fintech company Roger, Adam Šoukal, is selling his business for the second time — but instead of simply cashing out and stepping aside, he is staying with the company again, this time as one of the top executives of the entire Orbian group, as he moves with his family to Madrid.

Roger was founded in 2013 and buys long-payment-term invoices from companies, which it then sells on to investors, banks and funds. In 2020 a quarter of the company was owned by Komerční banka, and at the start of last year Roger was sold outright to the British group Orbian, which finances supply chains on a global scale — a similar business, but in a different market segment and on a far larger scale.

The deal valued Roger at around a hundred million crowns. Even before it closed, Šoukal said he had no intention of “lying on a beach” — he had already learned that pure investing, without the drive of running a business, did not satisfy him.

Now that all the regulatory procedures have been completed (the deal finally closed last summer), Šoukal is handing over management of the Czech market to his colleagues and will instead focus on the international expansion of both companies — Roger and Orbian. He will split his time between Brno, London and Madrid, from where he will oversee the group's growth in southern Europe.

“Now I can fully immerse myself in the business itself again,” admits the 40-year-old entrepreneur, recalling the tense period of the deal, which involved a complex shareholder structure including a venture capital fund, a strategic investor and Komerční banka.

The British company Orbian finances corporations with revenues starting at three billion euros — typically publicly listed companies or bond issuers. Brno-based Roger works with smaller clients, such as Notino, Datart and Alza, which are nonetheless major players by regional standards, with revenues in the tens of billions of crowns. Thanks to its focus on e-commerce, Roger serves this segment successfully, and under the partnership with Orbian, all suitably sized requests are now automatically routed to Brno.

According to Šoukal, the company is growing at a rate of tens of percent a year, both in terms of the volume of invoices financed and in margin. The British company has around five billion dollars in assets under management, while Roger has four billion crowns. This year Roger plans to finance more than 20 billion crowns' worth of invoices, and Orbian plans to finance 20 billion dollars' worth.

“Our good results and growth come from being able to focus entirely on our core business. Orbian gives us the room and the support to do that,” Šoukal explains why Roger is so interesting to the British group, even though it is still far smaller in scale.