Had a great meeting this week with a small private bank. It continues to amaze me that I can still find a new bank (and indeed one that I had never heard of!) after years of working to maintain relationships with bankers of all kinds. This bank has a great offering – a very traditional Read more about Private Banking[…]

Funding Circle is about a year old now. It got a lot of early profile as a new and innovative lender to small businesses and I went to their offices this week to meet them and see how they are progressing. I will rarely deal with a lender unless I have met with them and Read more about A good meeting with ‘Funding Circle’ this week[…]

Larger businesses that borrow money by raising share capital automatically have some form of ‘Investor Relations’ person or team. The principle is that they know that they are under scrutiny and that shareholders can just elect to sell shares which could damage their supply of funding. They therefore need to put some effort into communicating with shareholders, Read more about Who’s in your Lender Relations Department?[…]

I have been involved recently on a case where a client’s bank is proposing a SWAP deal on the back of an existing SWAP deal which does something quite clever. It writes a fresh contract in a way that negates the original fixed rate (it is a bit like an equation where the old rate becomes Read more about Are the banks ‘churning’ SWAP deals?[…]