British Business Investments, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank, has announced a new commitment to Compass Business Finance enabling an increased flow of asset finance products into UK-based smaller businesses in the print, packaging and manufacturing sectors.

Purple Dot, the ‘worth-the-wait’ payment option for fashion brands, today announces its seed round of £1.35 million, led by Connect Ventures, with support from, AI Seed, Moxxie Ventures, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring from AngelList, Vijay Pandurangan (ex-Twitter), Alex Roetter former SVP of Engineering at Twitter and the family office of Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.com.

EXM Insight, the next-generation solution for portfolio monitoring and value creation for the Private Equity industry, has successfully completed a £400,000 funding round with a £200,000 investment from the Enterprise M3 Growth Fund, managed by The FSE Group.

Private equity firm Grafton Capital has invested £7 million into Third Financial, the fast growing, innovative investment platform and software provider.

Grafton Capital’s investment takes it to majority ownership of the business, with £1.5m of fresh capital being injected onto the balance sheet. The deal follows previous investment rounds in 2015 (£2.5m), 2016 (£1.5m) and 2019 (£1.25m) to support the expansion of Third Financial’s infrastructure and outsourcing platform, which sits behind many of the UK’s leading wealth managers, IFA networks, family offices and disruptive fintech firms. This next phase will see a focus on accelerating the growth of the platform while meeting the evolving demands of the market.

NatWest is to set this year’s National Enterprise Challenge  – the largest enterprise and employability challenge for secondary schools in the UK.

The high street lender has set 14 and 15 year olds from around the UK the challenge to create their own social enterprise to address a common issue affecting their daily life, school, family or local community.

Duff & Phelps, the world’s premier provider of governance, risk and transparency solutions, has announced the launch of its Equity Match service. The new service matches the equity funding requirements of UK based SMEs with specialist equity investors from a select network.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of financial advice business owners and wealth management chief executives do not trust the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) 

Scale-up FinTech TotallyMoney, which is backed by Elliott Advisors and Scottish Equity Partners, following a £29 million investment in January 2019, has launched a new and exclusive app-only feature to help their three million customers gain a greater understanding of their borrowing behaviours and make better financial decisions. 

ClearlySo, Europe’s leading impact investment bank, has been named the Investment Bank of the Year by Environmental Finance at their IMPACT Awards 2020.  

Investment banking fees generated in the UK total £3.3 billion so far during 2020, 5% less than the value recorded at this time last year and the lowest year-to-date total since 2016 according to research by Refinitiv.

The Association of Investment Companies (AIC) has launched an online resource for prospective investment company directors, which aims to encourage a wide and diverse group of candidates to find out more about the role.

British Business Investments Ltd, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank, has made a new £30m subscription in specialist lender Shawbrook Group plc’s £75 million Tier 2 note issuance. The investment follows an original £30m subscription to Shawbrook Bank’s previous Tier 2 note issuance in 2015, which has now been repaid.