Royal Park Partners’ Aman Behzad: Where Crypto’s Billion-Dollar Deals Actually Get Made | Money 20/20 Europe 2026

Most of the people you meet at Money 20/20 Europe are trying to sell you something: a terminal, an API, a ledger, a token. Aman Behzad sells something quieter and, if you are a founder, arguably more important. He sells judgement about money itself: when to raise it, whom to raise it from, what your company is really worth, and whether the thing you have built is the thing the market actually wants to buy.

Behzad is the founder and managing partner of Royal Park Partners, a boutique investment bank that does one thing deliberately: it advises fintech, insurtech, and crypto companies on raising capital and on mergers and acquisitions, and it advises nobody else. I sat down with him on the opening day of the show at the Amsterdam RAI, in the middle of a building where, by the organisers’ own description, billion-dollar deals get done over coffee. He was candid in a way bankers usually are not, and the most useful thing he said had nothing to do with hype. It was a plain answer to a plain question: in this market, right now, who can actually raise money, and who is kidding themselves?

The banker who only ever talks to fintech

Specialist advisers are common in law and rare in banking, where most firms cover everything and go deep on nothing. Behzad built Royal Park Partners on the opposite bet. He spent more than two decades in corporate finance across Citi, the technology-focused Arma Partners, and FT Partners, the firm widely regarded as the original dedicated fintech investment bank. He came away convinced that financial technology had grown complex enough to need advisers who do nothing else, and in 2019 he left to prove it.

The firm he describes today is small by headcount and wide by reach: around twenty people spread across Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the United States. By its own account it has raised well over a billion dollars for clients and become one of the most active fintech advisers in the EMEA region, and Behzad was named a Corporate Finance leader of the year for 2026 in the UK. You can read more about the team on the firm’s about page, and Behzad keeps an unusually active presence on LinkedIn for someone in his seat.

None of that, on its own, tells you why a founder should pick up the phone. The answer to that turned out to be the most interesting part of the conversation.

What “deep knowledge” actually buys you

When I asked what makes the firm stand out, Behzad reached for a phrase that should set off alarm bells because every adviser on earth claims it: “deep industry knowledge.” So I pushed. Be specific. How do you actually acquire it?

His answer was less about genius and more about coverage. With a small team scattered across five continents, the firm watches how customers and businesses adopt new ways of paying, transacting and managing money at what he called “the most basic unit level,” then feeds those signals upward before they become common knowledge.

“We have our finger on the pulse of what is going on on the ground. We pick up on these trends extremely early, and we bubble them up for considerable corporates and larger businesses to observe, adopt, and rethink how they allocate capital.”

Put plainly, the product is timing. The firm’s edge is knowing a shift is real a few months before the rest of the market prices it in, and telling a client whether to raise now or wait, to sell or hold, to build a capability in-house or go out and buy it. For a founder staring at a single fundraise that will define the next three years of their life, that calendar sense is worth a great deal.

First, someone has to tell crypto founders who they are

The part of the conversation that will sting some readers was about crypto founders specifically. Behzad was respectful but blunt. Crypto attracted brilliant, very young builders who, by and large, did not come up through traditional finance. They know their protocol cold. What they often do not know is how a traditional investor or acquirer will categorise them.

So the first job, before any money is discussed, is translation. The firm sits with a crypto company and works out what it actually is in language the rest of finance understands. Are you a payments business helping people move on and off-ramp between fiat and stablecoins? Are you a market maker providing liquidity to traders? Are you really a data and fraud business that happens to operate on-chain? Founders tend to answer “all of the above.” Investors do not buy “all of the above.” They buy a clear category with a clear comparison set.

This is the unglamorous spadework that decides whether a fundraise is credible before it begins, and it is precisely the kind of depth that gets skipped when a founder runs a process alone. It is also, not coincidentally, the work that lets Behzad answer the next question with real numbers instead of optimism.

Why a stablecoin firm now out-raises a market maker

Here is where the interview earned its keep. The crypto capital market, Behzad said, is deeply cyclical, and the cycle has just turned hard.

In the months around the change of US administration, and through most of last year, investors wanted market makers, the firms trading crypto and printing money on volatility. Then volatility cooled, prices came off their highs, and the appetite moved. Today the money wants stablecoins and payments, and he was emphatic that this is most true in Europe.

He made it concrete, and the example is worth quoting in full:

“Is it realistic, if you are a business doing 30 million euros of revenue as a crypto market maker, to go and raise 100 million euros in the current market? Versus a crypto stablecoin business doing 30 million euros of revenue, break-even to slightly profitable, looking to raise 100 million euros. The second one is far easier to achieve in the current market climate than the first. But if we had this conversation 18 months ago, it would probably be the other way around.”

Same revenue. Same ask. Wildly different odds, decided almost entirely by which box you sit in and what month it is. That is the cyclicality Royal Park gets paid to read.

The macro backdrop supports him. Stablecoins are now a genuine pillar of the digital-asset economy rather than a niche: the total supply sits at roughly $318 billion as of this writing, with Tether’s USDT near $187 billion and Circle’s USDC around $76 billion. In Europe specifically, the arrival of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) has given regulated stablecoin and payments businesses something market makers cannot easily manufacture: a clear licensing path that institutional investors can underwrite. Behzad is not reading tea leaves. He is reading a rulebook and a balance sheet.

If you want a live example of the kind of company he means, look no further than Musqet, the Bitcoin payment-terminal company I interviewed at the same event. Behzad raised it himself, unprompted, as exactly the sort of payments-led crypto business that fits today’s investor appetite.

Curating capital, and the problem with “tourist investors”

Once a company knows what it is and how much it should raise, the firm does the part most founders underestimate: it picks the room. Behzad was scathing about the alternative.

“We don’t let people waste time with tourist investors in venture. We go to the deep venture capital investors who have a strong pedigree investing in digital-asset and crypto businesses.”

The phrase “tourist investors” is the whole pitch in two words. A founder raising on their own will take 40 meetings with funds that were never going to write a crypto cheque. Royal Park’s claim is that it already knows which dozen actually will, and it can get the equity story in front of the right partner instead of the curious associate. He pointed to corporate venture arms as some of the most active buyers in the space right now, naming the likes of Kraken, Coinbase and Tether as names writing real cheques into the ecosystem. From there it is the familiar choreography of a raise, run properly: shaping the story, managing diligence and Q&A, and getting to signed term sheets.

Why Money 20/20 Europe is the room where it happens

I asked him why a firm with twenty people would spend three precious days here rather than working the phones. His answer doubled as a sharp observation about the event itself. Of the three Money 20/20 shows, he argued, the European edition is the genuinely global one. The US show skews domestic and the Asian show skews regional, but Amsterdam pulls Asian acquirers, US venture capital and fintech operators from everywhere into a single building.

He was not speaking in the abstract. He had just come out of a meeting with a KYC and KYB digital-verification business, headquartered in Singapore and expanding into Europe, the kind of cross-border client that only really exists in a room this international. For a deal-maker, the value is density: more of the right conversations in three days than months of travel could buy. That is the same reason Cryptofocus set up here, and it is why the guest list at this event reads like a map of where finance is heading.

What’s next for Royal Park Partners

Behzad was open about the road ahead, and it points squarely at crypto. The firm opened in the US around three years ago and intends to keep doubling down there. Next on the map is Southeast Asia, which he expects to become a major centre of gravity for global capital flows. The most telling line, though, was about deal mix.

“Previously we probably did one digital-asset deal a year. Over the next six months you’re going to see us announce many more transactions in the digital-asset space.”

That is a firm repositioning itself in real time, betting that the advisory market for crypto companies is about to get a great deal busier. His stated ambition is not just to be the leading adviser to fintech broadly, but the leading adviser to digital-asset businesses specifically. You can watch whether the deals follow on the firm’s own news page, which is as good a barometer of crypto M&A appetite as any.

Why this matters for the Dutch and European reader

If you run, fund or work at a crypto company in the Netherlands or anywhere in Europe, there are two practical takeaways here, and neither depends on ever hiring Royal Park Partners.

The first is that your category, not your code, sets your valuation today. A team building stablecoin rails or regulated payments is raising into a tailwind that a market maker simply is not, and MiCA is part of why. If you have optionality in how you position the business, that choice is now worth millions in fundraising terms. The second is about timing. The most valuable thing an adviser like Behzad provides is not a rolodex but a calendar, a read on whether the window is open or closing for a company like yours. Founders who get that judgement wrong raise at the bottom and sell at the wrong moment; founders who get it right look like geniuses a year later.

Amsterdam spent three days this week as the place where a lot of those windows were quietly opened. Behzad and his firm were here to make sure the right founders walked through them, and on the evidence of this conversation, the smart money in European crypto is already paying attention.

This interview was recorded live at Money 20/20 Europe 2026 at the Amsterdam RAI. For more conversations with the people moving money, traditional and decentralised, watch the full Cryptofocus series and read our companion interview with Fincra’s Jemima Lewis on building one API for African payments.