Ben Sopranzetti

Ben Sopranzetti is a Professor of Finance and Vice Chairman of the Department of Finance and Economics at Rutgers Business School. He received his Ph.D. in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. He has over 25 years of international experience in building, valuing, and selling business enterprises. He is an expert in the area of Business Valuation, Investment Banking, Financial Strategy and Financial Negotiations. Professor Sopranzetti is widely respected as a master teacher, and has an outstanding reputation for designing and delivering innovative programs for financial institutions and corporate clients. He is particularly well regarded for his cutting-edge work on valuation, mergers and acquisitions, cross-cultural negotiations and high-level executive training.

Dr. Sopranzetti is the recipient of eighteen awards for excellence in teaching. He is a founding member of the Rutgers University Teaching Excellence Center. In 2008, he was honored by BusinessWeek as one of their 21 "Favorite Professors." Professor Sopranzetti is the advisor for the Little Investment Bankers of Rutgers (LIBOR), and places 30-40 students per year in front office jobs on Wall Street. In the course of his career, he has been involved in the job placement of over 500 students.

He has published in the Journal of Business, Journal of Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Manufacturing, Service and & Operations Management, and other well-respected academic journals. In addition, he is an associate editor of the Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies, and was a Director of the Eastern Finance Association. Professor Sopranzetti serves on several corporate boards and is a highly regarded valuation consultant and trainer at numerous Wall Street investment banks, including Bank of America, Bank of China, Citibank, CFSB, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Rothschild, UBS, and others.

In 2000, he founded Innovative Financial Solutions, a boutique investment banking and advisory services firm in Beijing, China, where he served as a managing partner. He sourced, negotiated and closed 19 deals between $25MM and $500MM. In 2006, he was a co-founder of the BEST Institute (Business, Engineering, Science and Technology) at Rutgers University. BEST is an organization that identifies, values, and commercializes University intellectual property. Professor Sopranzetti’s role involved managing the economic and financial due diligence associated with the commercialization of the inventions, including all valuation and funding requirements. In 2009, BEST was incorporated into the Office for Technology Transfer. Since 2009, he has started four companies, and is currently a senior partner at Partners2Market, a high-powered valuation and advisory services company.