Arun Kumar is an investment banking Managing Director with more than 25 years originating and closing cross-border mergers, acquisitions and capital markets transactions across the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States and India. He came to finance from engineering, through IIT Kanpur, Cornell and an MSc in Finance at London Business School, and has worked both the sell-side and the buy-side, from bulge-bracket institutions such as Credit Suisse First Boston, ABN AMRO and RBS through to boutique advisory. He has advised on transactions with an aggregate value of more than $10.2 billion.
He is Managing Director, Investor Coverage at The Post Oak Group, a FINRA and SIPC member firm in London, where he originates and manages investor coverage across twelve active M&A and capital-raising mandates and personally covers 96 investors across private equity firms, venture capital funds and family offices in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe. He serves on the board of Churchill Partners and is a Board Member of BIZMONI Corp, a Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence platform in London that has raised $14.1 million and employs 65 people.
At ABN AMRO, Arun led the UK deal team on Tata Steel’s £6.2 billion acquisition of Corus, covering the board pitch, valuation, due diligence and SPV financing. It remains the highest cross-product revenue deal in ABN AMRO’s history. At RBS he advised FTSE 350 and international clients on cross-border transactions including Glencore / Prodeco (US$2.5 billion) and the BAE Systems / Mahindra land systems joint venture, and worked on the Severstal and MMK GDR listings. On secondment to RBS Strategy and Corporate Development, he led the analysis for Kier’s £221 million acquisition of May Gurney and presented the contract-by-contract fit directly to the Chief Executive.
In mid-market advisory, his defining strength is origination. He billed more than £1 million in fees in each of 2017, 2018 and 2019, almost all of it on mandates he brought in himself, winning eight outright and delivering 15 sell-side transactions in four years. Signature deals from this period include the US$485 million sale of Allworld Exhibitions to UBM, later named International M&A Deal of the Year, and the £17 million sale of Xograph to H2 Equity. He has since led energy, med-tech and gas storage mandates as Managing Director at LBC Energy Advisory, and run buy-side programmes for technology and AI businesses at Horizon Capital.
Arun holds an MSc in Finance from London Business School, sponsored by Credit Suisse; an MS in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University, where he was a Charles C. Winding Scholar; and a BTech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He has volunteered with the Chelsea Pensioners at the Royal Hospital Chelsea since 2014 and is a Dementia Friend with the Alzheimer’s Society. He is a native speaker of English and Hindi and is based in London.
