The company offers advisory and investment solutions and was formed by the recent merger of P-Solve and River and Mercantile Asset Management.
A free float of 40% of the issued shares is being targeted, with Psolve’s former owner Punter Southall Group as a leading shareholder. The company management will be subject to a two-year lock-in period on any shares held.
The decision to go ahead now is based on desire to move the business forward as quickly as possible, rather than anything about the specific prevailing conditions in the IPO market, CEO Mike Faulkner told Portfolio Adviser.
“The plan has been there for some time and you can always make an argument to defer with such things, but we believe it’s best to just get on with it,” he said. “The benefits such as a signalling our independence and helping us to reward and incentive through equity are very clear,” he added.
Faulkner said that in his view the company is in prime position to take advantage of the ‘pensions revolution’ and expects that to be reflected in both the initial pricing on the new shares and the long term performance.
There are no directly comparable transactions the company is benchmarking its own IPO against Faulkner explained. “These things don’t happen very often in our industry and we like to consider our business unique, so I wouldn’t draw any direct comparisons,” he said.
A full prospectus is to be published in due course. Canaccord Genuity and Numis are the joint bookrunners on the proposed transaction.
The firm has £8.4 billion of assets under management, £6bn of which is in fiduciary management and £2.4bn in equity solutions. Its revenue for the year ended 31 December 2013 was £51.8m, with EBITDA of £14.7m.
