Numis shows the City at its best
AT least since Brexit one constant narrative around the City has been that its best days are in the past.
London bankers would be usurped by Europeans and Americans, and by technology that made their services seem quaint.
A quick look at Numis shows this simply isn’t so. The bank is a City success story, just one example of how the Square Mile reinvents itself when under pressure.
In the 90s, no one gave Numis much chance. It was a small cap broker in an overcrowded market, fishing for deals that Goldman and JP Morgan regarded as too tiddly to chase.
Now it is a serious player – the average client has a market cap of £1.3 billion and it has successfully boomed in the mid-cap market that the very biggest banks, to their later regret, mostly abandoned.
The entrepreneurial co-chief executives Alex Ham and Ross Mitchinson chime with risk-taking chief executives, market disruptors who see themselves in the bankers.
At 38 and 43 they are irritatingly young, but that’s also part of why tech CEOs like them.
To the outside world, multi-million pound bonuses, especially in the Covid age, are hard to understand.
Pay in financial services remains an outlier, it is indeed another world.
As the old saying goes, if you work in a biscuit factory, you get free biscuits. And if you work in a money factory…
But Ham, Mitchinson and colleagues will have earnt their bonuses. As long as they pay proper tax on them, there is no reason not to wish them well.
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