Wealth management platform Dolfin has launched an innovative Private Investment Club, giving its clients exclusive access to pre-screened investment opportunities across a range of sectors and global regions.
Simon Black, Head of Investment Management at Dolfin, explains that the driver behind the launch came from a client perspective. “We increasingly have clients who are looking at the economic environment and saying: ‘How can I generate real returns over the next five to 10 years?’” he says.
Black says that part of those conversations is creating investment opportunities for clients showing where they can be involved and included in the process but have holdings that generate real returns.
“The Private Investment Club provides a platform for clients to co-invest alongside each other into opportunities that we have identified,” Black says. “We present the opportunities and give the clients a chance to meet management and come to their own conclusions and allocate through direct investment, from GBP100,000, along with other clients, giving them a chance to build up a nicely diversified portfolio with direct opportunities.”
The opportunities have come from inbound requests from entrepreneurs or founders of smaller companies. “A lot of it is word of mouth,” Black says. “We work with a small number of venture capital funds so we receive these inbound enquiries and sometimes we have clients who are already invested and there is another round of fund raising looking for new investors to come in.”
The sectors are quite varied across health, agriculture, education and clean technology – often technology led in each area as the companies are focused on scalable next generation development, but there has also been an investment in the food and beverage sector. Geographically, the companies have been based in Germany, the UK, the US, Sweden and China, although all the analysis is done from the Dolfin home office in London.
“There are some other companies that try to do this kind of thing, but the difference is that we are not systematically selling a huge portfolio of opportunities, all live at the same time,” Black says. “Rather, for us, it’s an ongoing process of research and education – both on the companies we come across and our clients – to match the right opportunity with the right client.”
