About The Firm
Theatine Partners was founded in 2020 in order to offer clients senior-level, independent investment banking advisory services. We avoid structural business conflicts and adapt our approach and services to best fit our clients’ needs in a manner specific to each situation. We align our incentives with client objectives, and provide a consistently high level of service with integrity. We believe we are differentiated from many of our competitors not only through excellence and client satisfaction, but by also offering exceptional value for money given our lower overhead organizational structure.
Our mission is to help our clients meet their objectives through the application of a merchant banking mindset, where our success aligns with yours. We do this by undertaking detailed analysis, informed by empirical discipline, and offering insights and judgment informed by decades of relevant experience. We place a special emphasis on communicating clearly with clients and counterparties, and always maintain the highest levels of professionalism even in the most challenging situations.
As a boutique firm, we have the flexibility to approach prospective engagements from the vantage of “how can we best help?” and not “here is a service we can offer you”. We believe we are at our best when we ideate with potential and existing clients about the most appropriate or impactful role we can play, and our ability to act as an advisor, fiduciary or principal as a situation dictates enhances the solution set we bring to any task.
We were founded and are led by Richard Shinder, a 30-year veteran of the financial services industry with extensive experience in investment banking restructuring advisory, distressed investing, special situations lending, and leveraged finance.
Richard J. Shinder, Managing Partner
Richard J. Shinder is the founder and Managing Partner of Theatine Partners, an advisory and fiduciary services boutique based in Greenwich, Connecticut. He has 30 years of experience as an investment banker, restructuring advisor, distressed and special situations investor and fiduciary in connection with complex restructurings and recapitalizations, special situations financings, M+A transactions, private credit, and distressed investments.
Prior to establishing Theatine Partners in May 2020, Richard was Group Head of the Restructuring and Special Situations Group at Piper Jaffray & Co. Prior to Piper, he was a Managing Director in TPG Capital’s credit investing strategy. Richard was previously a partner in the Restructuring Group at boutique investment banking firm Perella Weinberg from 2009 to 2014. Before Perella Weinberg, he was a senior member of the Special Situations Group (SSG) at Goldman Sachs, the firm’s proprietary alternative investment business.
Earlier in his career he worked in the merchant banking and investing businesses of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Avenue Capital, respectively, and was also a Managing Director in The Blackstone Group’s (now PJT Partners) market-leading Restructuring and Reorganization Group. He started his career with Lehman Brothers in New York, where he worked in the Infrastructure and Leveraged Finance Groups and spent two years seconded to the Asia Investment Banking team based in Hong Kong.
Mr. Shinder is a highly regarded restructuring expert and frequent lecturer, speaker and panelist on business and financial topics, and he has written and spoken extensively on economic, financial, geopolitical, cultural, and corporate governance-related issues; his opinion essays have been featured in the Wall Street Journal on multiple occasions, as well as in other publications. A complete listing of his opinion essays can be found on his Muck Rack profile.
He has served as both an independent director as well as an interested (designee) director for almost two dozen companies, as well as on a number of not-for-profit and philanthropic boards. He currently serves on several private company boards, acting as Chairman of two such companies. He has served on the Board of Regents of Gonzaga University for the past twenty-two years, and sits on the University’s Endowment Investment Committee and its SBA Executive Council. He is also a member of the Economic Club of New York and the Turnaround Management Association, as well as the leadership committee of Catholic Renewal, a philanthropic industry body affiliated with Catholic Charities of New York.
Richard earned an MBA with distinction from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated summa cum laude from Gonzaga University.
He currently resides in Greenwich, Connecticut with his wife, children, and more dogs than he recalls signing up for.