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Who are City and Merchant? City & Merchant were established in 1991 and are fully regulated and authorised by the FSA. City & Merchant was originally created to provide a balanced group of traditional merchant banking activities aimed at the SME and SQC market place. Brining together corporate finance, IPO support and direct equity investing we have recruited senior executives from major institutions in order to achieve a unique vehicle for both companies and investors alike. In addition to our traditionally accepted role in Corporate Finance, City & Merchant have recently undertaken to offer a comprehensive range of global investment products to professional investors, to include Foreign Exchange, CFDs and Equities, as well as the more traditional derivatives, such as Futures & Options in Commodities, Currencies, Energy, Metals, Bonds and Interest Rates. We will act primarily as an Introducing Broker to several high profile London Houses, and will also be able to act as Principal in physical trading activities where required. It is our intention to proffer a very discrete & personal service to our customers, with 24 hour access to the global markets via our IB relationships, where orders can be quickly and efficiently placed on any worldwide exchange via a combination of electronic front-end and telephone order entry.Our senior management come from various fields within the Financial Services sector, their backgrounds covering the entire range from corporate law & finance through to accountancy, investment banking, trading, IPO & pre-IPO funding. City & Merchant has an investment committee consisting of several members of the Senior Management Team. This team meets whenever a new Company is seeking financing. The team considers a huge variety of issues and looks for certain assets within a prospective company including the strongest growth potential, the most experienced and proven management teams, the best market opportunity, the least competition and a healthy balance sheet and then conducts exhaustive research and due diligence. Only when every member of the team is happy to proceed do we act for a new company. It is these companies that are then offered to our private investors. It is also very important to understand that City & Merchant will only act for companies once they have reached the "D Round" of financing or later. That is to say that the funding they are looking to achieve is intended to take them to a cash flow positive / profitability situation and should be the last round of financing they need until they are looking at further expansion or acquisition etc. Whilst these are still growth companies and, as such, high risk, following this remit allows investors to get involved with companies that have achieved a certain level of proven value / success / revenue etc. and takes a large degree of uncertainty out of early stage investing. We were proved right to exit this market in 2008. Many other companies continued to value and invest in private companies and in most cases the results were very poor. There were also a large number of planned fundings that failed, leaving the underlying company in a precarious position. We believe that we will be proved right to now take advantage of all these underlying factors and actively build a small company / new issue portfolio. City & Merchant, by taking an equity stake in our client companies, align our interests with those of investors over the medium term. Simply put, we win if you win. Biographies Timothy Lyle, Group CEO Peter Brooks, Managing Director Trading David Papworth, Director of Corporate Finance and Company Secretary Les Sibthorpe, Head of Derivatives Trading Neil Butland, Marketing Manager |
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