Mr. Theys is a Managing Director in Houlihan Lokey’s Corporate Finance business, having joined in 2023 as part of the Benelux team to build out the firm’s Belgian activities. He is a seasoned financial services professional with 25+ years of investment banking and corporate finance experience. Mr. Theys’ areas of expertise include origination, evaluation, and execution of complex public and private M&A transactions, financial restructurings, and capital raisings for corporate clients and financial investors. He is based in the firm’s Antwerp office.
Throughout his career, Mr. Theys has covered the Benelux market across various sectors, before focusing on the technology, media, and telecom (TMT) sector in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe (including Russia/CIS). He has also maintained close relationships with financial investors based across Europe.
Prior to joining Houlihan Lokey, Mr. Theys founded and built out the Belgian activities at Nielen Schuman, a Dutch generalist corporate finance boutique. Before that, he joined M&A boutique Clairfield Benelux to focus on middle-market M&A transactions in Belgium. In 2014, he moved to Dubai to co-manage Delta Partners’ corporate finance arm, and in 2012, he moved to Moscow to act as Head of TMT Investment Banking at Sberbank. He started his career in 1996 at JP Morgan in Paris, after which he lived in London from 1997 until 2012, working at Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Arma Partners.
Mr. Theys holds an M.S. in Electrotechnical Engineering, specializing in Telecommunications, from KU Leuven in Belgium as well as an MBA from ESSEC Business School in Paris. He holds Belgian nationality and currently lives in Antwerp. Mr. Theys is also fluent in English, Dutch, and French and conversational in Russian.