Andreas Meyer from Fountain Square AM is our Fund Manager of the Month
16 SEPT, 2026
By Joanna Piwko from RankiaPro Europe
Andreas Meyer is the founder and managing director of Fountain Square Asset Management GmbH, a role he has held since October 2021. Previously, he spent six years as a fund manager at Aramea Asset Management AG, managing public and special funds worth up to €2.5 billion and handling trading, ESG responsibilities, risk management, and regulatory reporting. He began his career in corporate banking at BNP Paribas SA, following internships at Warburg Invest Kapitalanlagegesellschaft and Deutsche Börse AG. He holds an M.A. in Management & Financial Institutions from Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and a double-degree B.A. from Kedge Business School Marseille and Hochschule Bremen.
What were your early career beginnings like, and what has surprised you most since then about how the financial sector evolved?
Capital markets, their dynamics and the interaction of so many different factors have always fascinated and attracted me. Understanding economic relationships, but also psychology, is something I still find super exciting every day. Already during school and university, my path was quite clearly focused on ending up somewhere in business and finance.
I started by writing for financial blogs such as Seeking Alpha, followed by the more classical route of first internships, Corporate Banking at BNP Paribas and then six years in Asset Management before becoming independent and founding my own company.
Surprise factor: I am only in my mid-30s, so I clearly have less experience than many of my colleagues in the industry. Also, I can mainly speak for Credit, which is the market I am active in. What still surprises me is how often Mr. Market gets things wrong in Credit, sometimes leading to very strong reactions. I also find it interesting how quickly risk awareness can disappear after a few years of positive performance and how short-term some market participants can become.
Was there a particular person, deal, or market event that most shaped your decision to eventually found your own boutique?
My first mentor was Stefan Riße, who is now a capital markets strategist at Acatis, a German Asset Manager with more than EUR 10bn AUM. He taught me a great deal about market psychology and sentiment. His own mentor, in turn, was André Kostolany. That background helped me enormously, especially at the beginning of my career, and was a great source of inspiration.
At Aramea and under Sven Pfeil, I was able to earn my stripes and had the great opportunity to take on a lot of responsibility very quickly. I am still very thankful today for the trust I received there.
The idea to found my own boutique was actually born in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. During a trip of several weeks, far away from capital markets, the idea started to grow. That is also one of the reasons why our funds are named after birds such as the Colibri or Toucan.
The strategic idea behind the company is something like a “Blue Ocean light” strategy, which is something I learned about during my studies in Marseille. In the Anglo-Saxon world, event-driven credit has been an established strategy for a long time. In Germany, it is still rather rare. Offering this strategy from Hamburg, with a very high level of transparency and, among other things, in a UCITS structure gives us some clear USPs.
Event-driven credit, stressed/distressed credit and hybrids are a niche corner of the market few investors understand well. What do you find most exciting about that space, and what's been the hardest part of building a track record in it?
As mentioned before, especially Event-Driven, Stressed and Distressed Credit strategies are still relatively rare in the DACH region. This means that we provide our institutional investors with a lot of transparency, which we are happy to do and which is an important part of our approach. For example, we publish a very detailed monthly briefing. You will not find much macro or geopolitics in there. It is mainly about our events and individual credit situations.
We also launched at the end of 2021, so we went fully invested into the very intense bond market of 2022. As a Fund Manager, 2022 was a great year because we could demonstrate in a very serious stress test how the approach works. As an entrepreneur, however, it was of course difficult to approach new clients without a long track record, size, brand or a large team behind you.
The space itself is extremely exciting. Every new investment, meaning every new event, is different and brings new factors into the analysis. So you never stop learning. And unlike in some quantitative strategies, there is rarely simply black or white. The interaction with CFOs and Treasurers is therefore also important, and you constantly meet new people and learn about new businesses. The dynamics of capital markets complete the picture. Could there be a more exciting job?
How would you describe European credit markets in 2026 so far, in one word — and why that word?
“Fragmented”.
Credit spreads are tight, but dispersion is high, which creates interesting opportunities for event-driven credit investors like us.
Furthermore, you need to be nimble in this market environment. We have no idea whether rates will be higher or lower tomorrow, but what we can do is analyse the potential outcomes of our idiosyncratic events. That is super interesting.
Do you see German investors approaching risk more generally differently than investors elsewhere in Europe — more cautious, more conservative, or something else?
Yes, I would say German investors tend to be more risk-averse.
We often look at names with negative sentiment or companies that have just been downgraded. These are situations we sometimes have to explain in quite some detail in discussions with clients, which we are happy to do.
One of our first investments in 2022, for example, was in subordinated bonds of Greek banks. During a roadshow in Athens, I was told that they were still seeing almost no German investors in the order books. So this is one area where we can create additional value for our investors. In 2023 and 2024, we then allocated to hybrids of large European real estate companies, and the story was quite similar again.
We like to invest in underdogs.
Your funds are named after birds — Colibri, Toucan, Pelican. What's the story behind that, and why has it stuck?
After the Colibri worked so well and investors remembered the name very quickly, we decided to stay with the concept.
It was important to me that our funds have a strong recognition factor. We are a young team with a high level of intrinsic motivation. Of course, we also want to stand out a little bit, being out-of-the-box and so far the bird names have worked very well for us.
Do you think it's harder or easier for young professionals to get into a specialized niche like event-driven credit compared to when you started out?
At the beginning, there was definitely some scepticism because I was only in my early 30s. My first pitchbook, for example, was full of theoretical information, partly because I wanted to address exactly this scepticism.
Over time and with the growth of the company, this changed quite quickly. There were also several large investors who supported the new company and the project very early on, for which I am still very grateful today. Real “Early Birds”, so to speak. 😉
As already mentioned before, I actually believe that you can only be successful as a new boutique if you have a specialised strategy that is not already offered everywhere in your local market.
If I had launched just another plain-vanilla High-Yield or Hybrid fund mainly providing market beta, there would have been very little reason for investors to trust our new approach in Colibri. The relatively rare strategy in Germany, together with our out-of-the-box ideas and a very high level of transparency, helped us a lot.
One of our most important mission statements is “Always Risk-On”. This does not mean that we always believe markets will go up or that there is only one direction for generic risk. It means that we always want to find special situations on a bottom-up basis where we can generate idiosyncratic returns. Therefore, independent of the ups and downs of the overall market, we are usually fully invested.
What advice would you give someone starting out today who wants to build a career in asset management?
First of all comes passion, together with a broad and open-minded interest in many different areas.
I cannot manage Credit properly if I am not also interested in other parts of the market and the world around it.
From a practical perspective, a hands-on mentality, speed and the ability to understand new situations quickly are essential. And the rest has to be solved by hard work.
The job never really ends — and that is also what makes it so exciting.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work to switch off and step away from the markets?
Quite a few things.
Boxing is probably one of the best ways for me to completely switch off. If you are not concentrated there, you immediately get the feedback.
Also — and probably not everyone will understand this — I really enjoy long walks in the rain along the Elbe here in Hamburg.
Travelling and reading are also incredibly important to me because they continuously broaden your horizon.
And last but not least, there is my passion for SV Werder Bremen, a German football club (sometimes stressed as well 😉).
