Pollen Street announces the acquisition of a majority stake in Leonard Curtis, a corporate restructuring provider operating across the UK and offshore.
The multi-disciplinary professional services firm, which is headquartered in Manchester, reportedly has “over 30 years’ experience providing restructuring, legal, funding, M&A advisory and other business services to SMEs and corporates.”
Leonard Curtis has built a “national footprint and sector expertise, expanding through a combination of organic growth, geographical expansion and acquisitions.”
The business now has more than “330 professionals across 30 offices.”
Leonard Curtis reportedly has an “established referral community throughout the business services industry, including its own Lifecycle network, which enables over 3,000 regional accountancy practices to help their clients by accessing support, advice and solutions to financial and operational issues at every stage of their clients’ business lifecycle.”
The group will continue to be led by “current CEO Dan Booth, and Pollen Street’s investment will accelerate growth across the platform through product expansion, technology and M&A.”
Jonathan Guest, Investment Director at Pollen Street, commented:
“Leonard Curtis is a high-quality business with a proven model, experienced leadership, and has demonstrated … organic growth in the UK and offshore.”
Daniel Booth, CEO of Leonard Curtis, added:
“The partnership and investment from Pollen Street Capital will allow the business to move forward and better execute our plans to grow and develop the group.”
Earlier, it was reported that Pollen Street had announced a €75m investment financing the acquisition of a Public Sector Entities (PSE) receivables portfolio currently serviced by Officine CST.
Pollen Street is partnering with Collextion Services (CLX) on the transaction.
CLX is a servicer, investment and origination platform “specialised in PSE with ~95 FTEs.”
As part of the transaction CLX will take over “as servicer of the portfolio, acquiring systems of Officine and maintain the CEO, Deputy and the team in charge of collection of the portfolio.”
The portfolio investment and the PSC-CLX partnership paves the way to further invest “in PSE receivable portfolios taking advantage of a compelling market opportunity where banks may no longer be the best owner of such asset due to regulatory constraints.”
This transaction highlights Pollen Street’s capability to “compete for unique portfolio opportunities in markets requiring a specialist approach like the Italian Public Sector Entities receivables sector.”
The transaction aligns with their strategy of targeting asset-backed investments featuring adequate “structural protections and granular, cross-collateralised, diverse pools of assets with risk-adjusted returns.”
