Radek Barnert

Founder & CEO, WeConvene

Radek has over 20 years of experience in the finance industry, working on both the sell side and the buy side. For the last 5 years he has been the CEO of WeConvene which has a large private investor base, which meant that Radek has had to play the role of IRO during the last 5 years.
Radek started as a sell side research analyst in Australia in 1996 when he joined BZW. In his first sell side role Radek was a member of the Telecoms Research team during the time that the Australian Telecoms market was being deregulated. While at BZW Radek worked on the privatisation of Telstra and the IPO of OPTUS. Radek also led the firm’s efforts in internet research in the late 90’s.

In 2000, Radek moved to Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs where he served as a research analyst covering Asian Telecoms, Internet and Technology stocks. While at Goldman Sachs, Radek was involved in a number of IPOs and capital markets transactions. In 2003, Radek joined Credit Suisse to head up their Absolute Return Research product for the Asia Pacific. In this role Radek focussed on investment idea generation across all sectors and Asian markets for the firm’s clients.

During his time on the sell side, Radek was extensively involved in corporate and analyst access and he spent a lot of time with the C-suite and Investor Relations teams both for research purposes and capital markets transactions.

Between 2005 and 2011 Radek worked on the buy side as a long short Portfolio Manager. He was always focussed on the Australasian markets. His investment style was value driven long / short. A primary component of his investment process was meeting companies and analysts. During his time as a portfolio manager he was also involved in the equity capital markets activities of each of the firms he worked for including IPO participation, secondary share offerings and a variety of other corporate actions. As a Portfolio Manager Radek also had first hand exposure to the corporate access process from the buy side perspective and also spent a lot of time interacting with the C-Suite and IROs during capital markets transactions.

Radek’s many years of experience on the sell side and buy side were the inspiration for the idea to build the WeConvene platform. Radek saw first-hand the inefficiencies, frustrations and resource waste that stemmed from the way corporate access and analyst meetings were organised and executed. Ultimately Radek lamented the way things were being done and the ‘pain’ involved and decided that there has to be a better way to do this given the high value and importance of such meetings.

WeConvene was founded in 2012 not long after that “a-ha’ moment – with the mission of building a global meeting platform for the capital markets essentially the “dimmi” (the Australian version of OpenTable) of investor meetings.

During the Company’s first four years Radek ran WeConvene from Hong Kong but moved to New York in 2017. Since then he has been spending more time on the US and European client base, as a result he has unique insights of a global nature on the world of corporate access and the changing dynamics of the IR world.