Graham Bishop, investment director at Heartwood Investment Management, gives his insight on what we can expect in 2019.

Credit Fintech provider TotallyMoney has agreed £29 million of funding from Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited (Elliott) and existing investors Scottish Equity Partners (SEP). The investment, which is subject to FCA approval, will be used to accelerate customer acquisition, build out the market leading technology platform and, through continued innovation, provide better credit for UK consumers.

Goldex, the first smart trading app that powers ethical pricing for retail gold investments today announced it has raised over £1 million in a pre- series A round led by a group of prominent angel and institutional investors in the financial, payment and technology sectors.

Amongst those participating in the round are Prepaid Financial Services, one of Europe’s largest payment card issuers; Gae?l de Boissard, former Executive Board Member of Credit Suisse; Richard Balarkas, former President and CEO of Instinet and current NED at CBOE Europe and Saxo Capital Markets; Craig James, founder and CEO of Neopay and Chairman of the Board of the Prepaid International Forum, the industry body representing e-money and payment service companies.

David Absolon, Investment Director at Heartwood Investment Management, looks ahead and assesses the market for credit investors.

One of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organisations, deVere Group, is to launch a suite of mutual funds under its newly formed brand, dVAM.

Working with Pacific Asset Management, who have built the solutions from an operational, regulatory and technology perspective, the dVAM range of funds represent the “next chapter in deVere’s ongoing success story.”

deVere Group founder and CEO, Nigel Green, comments: “We’re uniquely positioned in the international space to bring these exciting new propositions to the market due to our scale and resources.

PIMFA, the trade association for investment managers and financial advisers, has called for an urgent review of the financial services compensation scheme (FSCS)

Michael Stanes, Investment Director at Heartwood Investment Management

Global investors have had a love-hate relationship with Japan for many years. Effectively ignored for two decades since the bubble years of the late 1980s (with some short bursts of enthusiasm in between), the arrival of Shinzo Abe as prime minister in 2012 kindled hopes that this sleeping giant would find its feet, and help unlock the latent potential of its corporate and consumer sectors.

Port Talbot headquartered Vizolution will be expanding in North America and South America following a recent round of funding.

Gohenry, the company behind the gohenry financial tool which is enabling a generation of kids and teens to take part in the digital economy and learn about money, has successfully raised £6.2m via Crowdcube, the world’s first and largest equity crowdfunding platform. The funds raised will be invested in products and marketing, as well as expanding gohenry’s operations in the US.

Gohenry’s raise on Crowdcube launched in September with a target of £2m, which it has exceeded by 3x. Over 3,000 investors have taken part in the raise, which is gohenry’s third on Crowdcube. Gohenry’s previous raises on Crowdcube were in 2016 and 2017, and the total amount gohenry has raised on the platform now stands at over £10m. This latest raise makes gohenry one of the first companies to take advantage of the newly-raised prospectus threshold – previously regulations permitted companies only to raise up to €5m without issuing a prospectus, but in July this figure rose to €8m.

By Matthew Toms, Investment Manager at Heartwood Investment Management

Offering insight into UK investment markets feels like an impossible task, given the fluidity of the Brexit situation and ongoing political volatility. Instead then, let’s focus on a couple of the longer-term issues in UK markets facing investors today. First, the global nature of UK equities; second, the usefulness (or otherwise) of UK government bonds.

A pioneering actively managed cryptocurrency solution has been launched by deVere which has founded the deVere Digital Asset Funds, a suite of digital currency solutions for experienced investors, in association with Dalma Capital Management Limited, a prominent hedge fund manager in the Dubai International Financial Centre. 

Bitcoin’s influence and dominance of the cryptocurrency sector will “drastically reduce” in its second decade, with the crypto market likely to expand by “at least” 5000% in the next 10 years.