What Just Happened?
Nucleus is to become a UK listed company. Here is the notification from David Ferguson to announce the exciting changes coming to our favourite investment platform.
Hi Howard,
Nucleus admission to the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange
Further to our recent correspondence, I’m delighted to advise that we have announced our intention to float the company on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange this morning. The planned admission date will be confirmed in due course.
An admission to AIM will raise our public profile and make it easier for the business to raise money in the future should it need to. It will also allow us to invest even more in attracting the very best people to support you and your clients and to continue to invest in our product.
This isn’t just about powering our own growth, but that of the financial planning firms we work closely with day in day out. We hope this move will ultimately benefit advisers by giving us the scope and scale to continue to develop and drive innovation to better serve you and your clients.
We’re keen to stress that this will not impact the way you use the platform in your day-to-day role. It’s about growing the business, in order to build on our offering to you as advisers.
The senior management team, including myself, fully intend on remaining in place and as such, we are all 100% committed to leading the business for many years to come. Our ambitions for this company and the community of advisers it represents has never been stronger. When we started this wee adventure in 2006 we had very big plans and I don’t think we’re even halfway to achieving what we set out to do.
On behalf of everyone at the Nucleus team I would like to extend a sincere thank you for all your support over the years and for getting us to where we are today. I am enormously proud of what we have built in the twelve years we’ve been working together. It’s thanks to you that we’ve established such a successful business, and we are extremely excited about the future.
If you have any questions regarding the admission that you would like to raise with me personally, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I would be very happy to talk anything through with you.
Best regards,
David Ferguson
Founder and CEO
What Now?
Well nothing really. It’s business as usual. Personally it is an enormous relief to me that Nucleus didn’t just take the easy option of being taken over by a large insurance company. The days of transparency would be over and charges would creep higher. As it is, there is no change in senior personnel and the company ethos of transparency and value for money continues.
I understand nothing lasts for ever, but since we started to use Nucleus over a decade ago, they have been a very stable and fair business to deal with.
Nucleus are not alone. Transact, a rival platform we considered a decade ago but decided against because of higher client cost, has also grown impressively. They too floated themselves in February of this year. Integrafin Holdings PLC is the business name of Transact. I hope they grow nicely for us all as they now form a small holding in our full model portfolios.
What Next?
Independent Advice Ltd. is a small Nucleus shareholder. We invested £12,500 initially in 2007, just to give our firm access to the platform. We have no plans to sell any of our shares as we have confidence in Nucleus’s growth plans going forward.
Hopefully there will be enough other early investors out there who now wish to sell their shares, to allow us to introduce Nucleus shares into our full model portfolios. (We can only buy shares if they become available).
The word is that the other platform we use for clients, Investcentre, will also seek a stock market listing later this year. It’s many years since Investcentre (or SIPPcentre as it was known previously) was our “go-to” platform for new clients. That business had evolved into a much more impersonal place, with lower service standards and a much narrower service offering. However the business is huge and will also likely be considered as a constituent of our full portfolios.
If you have any questions, by all means give me a call or email me.