Welcome to this fourth edition of the Laeceum Year End Review. After what has been yet another challenging year, I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well.
Following on from our first sell side advisory mandate for the CEO of a successful UK-based training and networking business at the end of last year, we started 2021 working on long term engagement for a highly ambitious and fast growing international professional services firm. Working with a senior team, we have been installed as their in-house corporate development capability to help them refine and exploit a range of ground-breaking intellectual property assets developed by a market leading third party with the support of a global credit reference agency. Through this engagement, our client can now early identify high propensity prospects with pin-point accuracy as well as develop a body of insightful and forward-looking marketing collateral to support national, regional and local thought leadership campaigns. We are fortunate enough to be supporting a very talented and tenacious client sponsor who has a grand vision which we are very proud to be involved in. Our work has already helped yield some early wins thus validating the potency of the IP and the ability of our client to monetise it.
Coming into the summer, a conversation with a PE-backed fast growth specialist SME lender evolved into an exclusive pilot engagement for the design and provision of on-demand peer analysis to complement the origination team’s new business origination process. This pilot has since been extended following some very constructive and robust feedback from the client sponsor team resulting in an extended end-user base within the lender. We are fortunate to be working with a prestigious and well-respected brand in the SME lending market and we are pulling out the stops to ensure we continue to build on the good work of the past few months.
We created and nurtured many friendships this year within the banking, asset management and fintech spaces. We look forward to building on these over the coming months as opportunities to partner crystallise and as we continue to invest heavily in broadening our capabilities. Growing interest in our SME Data & Analytics capability has allowed us to re-double or efforts on this very special initiative with a view to launching our first commercial proposition fully exploiting the novel IP that has taken over 2 years to develop and test.
Whilst on the talent front, we have missed our usual array of on-campus activities and events at Cambridge and UCL universities due to the pandemic, we have now committed to a schedule of face-to-face sessions for 2022 including recruitment events, careers talks and workshops which we are very excited to be a part of. We look forward to meeting the future generation of “Laeceumites” during these sessions and we encourage anyone to pop over and say hello to us.
So, with another year behind us, I would normally be extending thanks to friends of the firm for their help, support and encouragement over the past 12 months. Instead, this year I want to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to my team for their continued conviction and belief in the Laeceum mission. Their hard work, humour and sheer brilliance has been both humbling and awe-inspiring in equal measure and I look forward to working with them and our clients past, present and future in 2022.
Stay safe, take care of each other and have a wonderful New Year.
Ravi Chauhan | Founder & MD
