One of the most interesting deals I worked on was the IPO of Old Mutual Asset Management on the New York Stock Exchange. Old Mutual Asset Management, I'm gonna call it OMAM, was a subsidiary, a US subsidiary of Old Mutual. Now, right from the start, this deal came with a lot of complexity because OMAM was an underperforming US asset management company and it was an asset management multi-boutique company, which meant that it owned a lot of really, really small asset management boutiques, and the performance of all of them wasn't actually quite good. So one of the things we had to start off with was evaluating each one of these little boutiques. Once we sold the non-performing assets, once we restructured it, then we had to take some time to figure out valuation, which was a challenge because OMAM was a really unique company and there were no relevant peers. So that made it really hard when it came to spreading comps. That made it really hard when it came to understanding where this company stood relative to other asset management companies in the US. So it took us a while to get our equity story right, that is our USP that we could then convey to potential investors and shareholders. The other issue here was the sheer amount of regulatory implications. Now, this was a really unique situation where we had a UK company with a majority South African shareholder base and looking to IPO, a US asset. So from the very start, we had to comply with US, UK and South African regulators.

One regulator is difficult, two is interesting, three is definitely, definitely frustrating. So that added a lot of complexity to the transaction. And as I mentioned before, when you have more complexity, it adds more time. When you have more time, it leads to more leaks. We had a couple of leaks. The transaction was leaked to the media twice, so we had to delay it a couple of times, which was, you know, not ideal but such is life when it comes to large-scale transactions. And finally, it's an IPO. It's a capital markets transaction. What you want on the day that you list is a really, really strong equity market. Unfortunately, for us, the day before, we had the Greek debt crisis, which meant that we woke up the morning of the IPO and saw our equity markets globally in the red. Not great, but we couldn't control that. And we still went ahead and we listed and were very, very fortunate. Our deal was oversubscribed, so it was a real challenge but we got it through the line and everyone was very, very happy, although very tired at the end of it.