London’s new Lord Mayor calls for UK wealth fund to back fast-growing businesses

It’s great that we have a new Lord Mayor of The City of London who is actually from the Financial Services community and can speak for it with authority. Oh, that more members of the financial City would become involved with the Civic City and really ground its very excellent charitable Livery Companies. Hill Coates Associates spends much of its time introducing established companies to the private equity community to fund their growth journey. Occasionally we are asked to help an early-stage company, and this is really tough. VC’s and EIS Investment Managers won’t really look at anyone who doesn’t already have market traction within sight of £1m revenues, and the “cool” tech VC’s can be arrogant and offhand, confident that there will be another idea along in a minute if they dismiss this one. Angel networks are hard to pretty disorganised and hard to penetrate; family offices are often opaque and understandably hard to locate; crowdfunding and government funds often have bossy managers who are happier to tell you why the answer is “no” rather than “yes” or worse why they won’t even look at your proposition. So, an accessible fund drawing on the capital available from institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies would a great help to spur the growth that our economy needs so much.