He subsequently joined Swiss Bank Corporation Limited (now UBS), where he was responsible for International Corporate Finance at the bank’s Basel headquarters before moving to London as Executive Director of Swiss Bank Corporation International. In 1983, he was appointed CEO of Elders Finance and Investment Company in Melbourne, Australia, where he was also a member of the Chairman’s Committee of Elders IXL plc and Deputy Chairman of the Australian Merchant Bankers Association.

These roles entailed extensive travel in Europe, Asia and the Americas, where Neil led transactions across a broad remit including real estate, hospitality, natural resources, energy, manufacturing and retail. Neil V. Sunderland returned to Switzerland in 1989 and acquired Adinvest AG as a vehicle for his business interests. He transitioned the company from the “in-house merchant bank” of eminent Swiss industrialists to an investment/asset management and financial advisory firm, providing consulting and investment services to private and institutional clients with an emphasis on private equity and restructuring. Adinvest now operates solely for its own account. Key investment themes included life sciences, e-commerce, fintech and the digital economy.

Alongside his work with Adinvest’s investee companies, Neil has served on the boards of businesses in Europe, the United States and Australasia ranging from start-ups to growth and listed public companies. These board roles have included Leica plc, Saurer AG, Cosa Liebermann SA and RELX Swiss Holdings SA. Neil chaired Xing AG (now New Work SE), for many years - including through the company’s IPO - and was a member of Adyen’s shareholder committee prior to the company’s AEX listing. He was also a member of Terra Consilia, the business advisory board of Terra Firma Capital Partners in London, served as Chair of the Beaurivage Hotel in Neuchatel and was a long-standing advisory board member of Montreux Equity Partners in California.

Today, Neil limits his board positions to exxeta AG, a leading German tech and consulting company, and Promontory Therapeutics Inc, a clinical-stage drug development company in New York focussed on novel therapeutics in oncology. Neil holds a B.Sc. (Eng.) with honours in Chemical Engineering, an M.Sc. with distinction in Management Science from Imperial College, London, and a PhD (Dr.sc.techn.) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. His doctoral thesis addressed the stability of funds in the banking system.

Neil V. Sunderland is married with two daughters. Among his varied interests, he is an avid traveller to remote places and a friend of high mountains. He is also the founder of The Sunderland Collection, a notable collection of antique maps and atlases - a small contribution to a better understanding of human endeavour and the development of thought during the age of discovery, a never-ending story.