Interview with
British Business Investments (BBI) Donna Battersby (Regional Manager, North West - Deepbridge Capital) talks to Sue Barnard (Senior Manager, North West UK Network - British Business Bank) and Mark Barry (Investment Director - British Business Investment). Can you provide an overview of the background, purpose and the goals of British Business Investment? Sue Barnard: The British Business Bank is just over 8 years old and was created to ensure the SME Finance works better across the United Kingdom. BBI is government backed and we support startup, scale-up and stay-ahead businesses. However, we do not directly invest into these businesses ourselves, we work with over 180 finance partners across the UK, one of which being Deepbridge Capital. We work with Deepbridge Capital to identify gaps in the market where BBI can share the risk and co-invest into growing businesses across the UK. Before the pandemic, BBI was funding around £8 billion a year in equity loans and guarantees across our partners. However, during the pandemic a lot more companies would have become more familiar with BBI, as we were providing support with bank loans, business interruption loans and future funds. During the last 12-18 months, that on-going support provided by BBI, scaled up British Business Bank and we were then funding in the region of £87 billion across 1.6 million business across the UK. Where does BBI sit within the structure of fund raising? Mark Barry: British Business Investment sits as one of two commercial investment arms within the BBB group and BBI was initially set up to co-invest alongside the
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private sector into debt yielding products. Going to lower mid-market debt through a range of strategies including debt funds, asset finance, FinTech, challenger banks. Our team currently consists of 70 people, so we have a cumulative balance sheet of commitment of about £3 billion. More recently, we have started to move into equity, Deepbridge Capital being one of our partners in one of the equity programs. We are seeing quite a bit of growth in British Business Investments activity and reach too. Deepbridge has been mandated to manage £15 million from British Business Investments’ Regional Angels Programme, can you give context as to why you’re working with Deepbridge Capital? MB: We primarily picked our funding partners based on the due diligence we did on them and the regions they are also based in. We then co-invest into every deal that they do so that they can do more deals, slightly bigger deals and help them in their own growth journey too.
Bank do. I was originally meeting with Andrew to do a promotion of Northern Powerhouse Investments and people started to look at what exactly British Business Bank actually is. Then that led to having a conversation about Andrew, suggesting Deepbridge take a look at one of our other programs which has been around for a while. I did explain that it isn’t an overnight process by any means, and there were no promises either, nor was it my own decision! However, it’s always very satisfying for me to see when a Northern Finance Partner such as Deepbridge begins working with British Business Bank. It is part of the job, yes and like I said earlier, quite exciting. Would you be able to give some insight about the rationale as to why Deepbridge was chosen to manage these funds alongside BBB?
Sue, I believe it was your introduction that led to Deepbridge managing £15 million from British Business Investments’ Regional Angels Programme, is this a key role of what you’re involved with?
MB: To date, we backed 10 managers with total commitments of £115 million. Of that, Deepbridge manages £15 million. We actually look for quite a lot in our investment criteria, it is not an overnight process by any means. British Business Bank are putting up £15 million to be invested over four years and the agreements themselves are actually 15 years long, so it really is patient capital. They are very serious, kind of institutional like commitments that we take very seriously and manage professionally.
SB: In all honesty, it was pure coincidence when chatting to Andrew Aldridge at Deepbridge about what British Business
The areas that we look at mainly around the management team are track record, the investment strategy, deployment and
