PE Opportunity Pitch - WSO Network

Dear WSO community,

After some dense christmas dining I thought it would be a great time to share this with you.

First of all, this is a brief pitch for small PE investors looking at opportunities within the european financial services / am industry. The reason I am writing on WSO is due to having an extensive network on the public markets side but not so much on the PE branch.

We are talking about boutique financial services company in regional market (think Spain/ Italy / France) providing asset management (1bn in european/thematic/absolute returns equity funds and 1bn in equities from HNWI), corporate finance (2-3 person team providing small listings and some m&a) and brokerage services (platform to trade, ER services, and 3-4 specialised executiom traders).

Honestly, I think it represents a great case for PE since the overall company loses money but the Asset Management side has 17mn in revenues and 6mn net income. The problem lies mostly in the fact that ownership is a family that originally comes from the brokerage side of things and is unwilling to admit that they failed to run the brokerage side and keep investing in it ignoring the other profitable branches. They are chiefly investing in a trading platform which is super expensive and obviously if you do not have huge flows like FlatexdeGiro is not going to happen. Investment case is, thus, buy the company cheaply since it is loosing money, close the brokerage side and focus only on the AM.

I’d be happy to provide the full details, if interested or know someone that could be please PM.

This is not a troll post and in exchange for it I am not looking for a cut in the profits, I will just ask for top management of the AM to be fairly compensated (they are currently massively underpaid since overall company is losing money and my interest lies in one of them being a relative, which also helps me in obtaining all the internal info).

Merry Xmas🎉