Unit 30 Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital listening 1c

Ed Coombes My name is Ed Coombes and I am a corporate finance executive 1________, a small corporate finance team that is regulated by the SFA, and we focus on rais ing funds for private companies. We specialize in the technology, media and telecoms companies. Primarily because ten years ago if you wanted to start one of those companies you needed a lot of money and it took a long time to grow it, then gradually society is demanding products, and so is industry, which are faster to develop and the money necessary to develop them is less, and so, and also the speed to market is less. A market opportunity has opened up in the technology, media and telecom sector, compared to ten, fifteen years ago. It's speed of getting a company up and running, 2________, and pension funds who traditionally in the past were risk averse and also like to just invest in the large companies. They are not getting the return on their investment so they recognize they need to take a higher risk, so a smaller potential high growth company, and they get a higher return. That's effectively the market opportunity that has opened up which wasn't around so much ten years ago and in the financial sector, the banking sector, 3_________they have recognized this, whereas ten years ago they would only service clients that were listed on exchanges, gradually the corporate finance teams have seen, ah, we need to go and find those companies that are going to list and the next stage was, ah, well before they list they're private companies, and we need to go and help them before they even get to that stage for listing, and so bankers like myself have left the City and are now, we're increasing in number and are seeing there is 4_________. Now for us it's cost effective because when we raise some money, if you're a large bank or a small bank you take your fee in cash. What we do is,we, if we raise, if we're dealing with a small company we can't always take it in cash but we'll take it in equity, which is shares in the company, 5_________and if we take the rest of the fee in equity, shares in the company, then we hope that in two or three years' time this will be a high growth company and ideally it lists on the markets and we can sell our shares then.

A a market need for corporate finance at the smaller end of the scale
B and the hope is that we take enough cash to cover our running costs
C and I work for Cambridge Capital Partners
D if we take corporate finance services
E money available for it from high net worth individuals