100 Stories of Growth - Insights from Entrepreneurs

Today the phrase ‘financial ecosystem’ is sometimes overused but it is a concept that we all need to continue promoting. Claire Dorrian says that improving the UK’s interconnected financial system to better support ambitious scale-up companies access long-term equity finance is absolutely critical. 71 70 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE Some might argue it’s utopian to expect a seamless transition from nascent finance stages through to public markets, but progress is being made. We’re seeing financial market participants, alongside ourselves, working together and taking ownership to create a fertile environment for growth companies. This collaboration provides SMEs the ability to climb the funding ladder by offering practical mentoring and advice, access to expert networking and a supportive risk culture to incubate companies. In a perfect world scale-up organisations would have access to a seamless chain of finance, practical mentoring and advice, expert networks and a supportive risk culture. This needn’t be a utopia. We’ve seen examples where market participants take ownership and work collaboratively to bring these elements to today’s growth companies – and it really works. The UK is a great place to start a business and the number of new UK companies is at a record high, 1 but the odds are PROMOTING THE FINANCE ECOSYSTEM WORDS BY CLAIRE DORRIAN UK Equity Primary Markets – London and the South, London Stock Exchange Claire Dorrian, UK Equity Primary Markets - London and the South, London Stock Exchange 1 StartUp Britain http://startupbritain.org/startup-tracker/