By 2000, I had been living and working in The Netherlands for four years. My employer, Bouwfonds Nederlandse Gemeenten/STATER, was owned by the municipalities of the Dutch government and was acquired later that year by ABN Amro. As the Director of Corporate and Business Development, my job was to increase the value of the company by contributing new ideas and business models, setting strategy and growing the company through cross-border joint ventures and greenfield operations. I worked with an incredible team at STATER led by the pioneering CEO Rik Douwes who, for the record, created the world’s first digital and paperless originator and servicer in 1997. (American firms have been claiming to be the “world’s first” since 2015. During my tenure, I had mapped out the market dynamics of 18 countries and was on the road, on average, 200 davs a vear. Given the extensive network and reputation that I had built across the UK and Europe as well as my ideas to drive innovation and transform the European housing market, rather than stay within the confines of ABN Amro, I decided to leave and start my own entrepreneurial advisory firm, EuroCatalyst BV.

EuroCatalyst initially provided hands-on advisory services to establish, acquire and/or build cross-border operations for firms engaged in housing finance and related ventures, including fintech, mortgage distribution, origination, servicing and funding across the EU. My first clients were incumbent banks, investment banks, private equity and venture capital firms. In capital markets, I helped national covered bond market issuers in Europe increase their investor bases around the world. To put EuroCatalyst “on the map”, I wrote a comprehensive White Paper comparing and contrasting the products, performance, processes and practices of EU and North American mortgage markets, which to my knowledge, was the first national market-to-market comparison and global industry benchmarks ever done. As a result, I inadvertently became a clearinghouse for information on global mortgage markets. Almost every firm that aspired to analyze, establish operations, acquire or hire across borders would inevitably contact me. In preparation for the planned “Single Market” for financial services across what would become the “Eurozone” in 2002, I became an advisor to the European Commission to advise on the harmonization of EU mortgage markets.

At the IMN Global Asset Backed Securitization conference in Barcelona that year, I presented a speech entitled, “The Owl of Minerva Only Flies at Night,” which was a direct reference to Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher who observed that wisdom only comes in retrospect. Or as I like to lament, wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do us any good! The presentation laid out my early concerns about the impact of globalization on mortgage markets, which I believed was the industry most sensitive to commoditization. To establish context to the presentation, I attributed Karl Marx as the “father of risk management” (which is true – he was the first philosopher to argue that we could control the future and should strive to control it and commented that while communism and socialism have essentially failed, capitalism – also born as an Enlightenment ideal – was a similar grand social experiment with an unpredictable trajectory and outcome. They were some pretty “heady” topics in any discussion, but as I would learn, darned near blasphemy in a room full of investment bankers. To add a bit of self-deprecating humor to the presentation, I played part of the song, “I Saved the World Today” by the Eurythmics at the end of my speech. The audience reaction to the presentation was deafening silence. After about 30 seconds, one person – the crazy and brilliant Swede Peter Fredell – clapped very slowly and loudly said, “Bravo Toni, that took guts”.

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