Looked at through the eyes of corporate venturing, the most important centre for financial services innovation is no longer the traditional dominant cities of New York and London but instead is the home for technology venture capital – California.
While Global Corporate Venturing has tracked a handful of deals in New York City and London, and similar numbers in the emerging markets of China, India and Singapore, corporations have backed at least 10 California-based financial services-focused start-ups in the 12 months to the end of August (see table).
Entrepreneurs and venture capital firmsin and around Silicon Valley have seized the opportunity for change created by the credit crunch that started in mid-2007. The technologies developing the next generation of financial services products, such as mobile payments, data analysis, security and online services, are all areas where the Valley has been traditionally strong in funding and attracting entrepreneurs since the 1990s, with the most high-profile exit in the earlier vintage being online transactions provider PayPal.
PayPal was sold to auctioneer Ebay in 2002 for $1.5bn after series A backing from mobile phone maker Nokia’s then-corporate venturing unit, BlueRun Ventures, before a host of other banks, technology providers and VCs invested after the millennium.Phone companies have remained interested in the sector and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, with Korea’s SK Telecom Ventures backing Billing Revolution, Rogers Communications, Verizon and Blackberry Partners Fund backing Payfone and SingTel and Nokia Growth Partners backing Vivotech.
However, such disruptive technologies and services have encouraged financial services firms to set up their innovation teams in California to join the dealmaking rather than just the investment bankers that can help advise or finance the entrepreneurs.
In the past 18 months, a number of financial services firms have set up or hired in California. US-listed bank Citigroup moved its chief innovation office, Deborah Hopkins, to the Valley from the east coast of America in July last year, while in September credit card American Express hired Harshul Sanghi from phone maker Motorola as part of its Amex Ventures division.
Chris Kay, head of ventures at Citi Ventures, said: "Our charter is to create strategic value for Citi, not invest for financial reasons, and so be in the flow of the best thinking and among the best entrepreneurs.
"[Hence] our chief innovation officermoved to Silicon Valley last year and we have a team in Shanghai and in Singapore as we try and create value, real mutual value.
"For entrepreneurs, we promise to act quickly and be creative to help them scale far faster with their business plans and overcome the dissonance usually seen between big companies and entrepreneurs.
"Citi is ready to partner in a new way, and is prepared to disaggregate our capabilities to put them together with new partners, such as Morningstar and Microsoft with Bundle, or help Google Wallet. Who would have thought three to fiveyears ago we would be partnering these non-traditional financial services companies?"
Hopkins, who is also chairman of venture capital initiatives at Citi, said: "2008-09 was a time of tremendous shifts for financial services, and Citi’s leaders were prescient in seeing what Citi could be and how we could grow when we came out of the crisis. They recognised the need for us to find new ways to access our colleagues and ideas.
"Our team’s job is to see waves of trends and capabilities as they emerge and before they hit the shore. Corporate venturing is about looking at the world differently, making connections and helping companies migrate."
Citi Ventures’ investment in the past year, therefore, has indicated the strategic concerns of the universal banking model, such as demographic urbanisation, digitisation and the data explosion, and mobility through internet-enabled devices.
Kay said Citi was getting better at incorporating social data into helping people manage their finances, and had backed California-based companies, such as ReadyForZero that enables customers to be smarter in their own finances.
However, as a gatekeeper of finances and personal data, Citi has also used Citi Ventures to find security-focused entrepreneurs, such as US-based Silver Tail Systems, a web security company.
This month, Amex said it would invest $100m in digital companies with a focus on early-stage start-ups. The company’s digital commerce initiative will be led by Sanghi.
Sanghi said Amex was building a team of between 30 and 50 people covering investments, application development and business development at Amex.
Sanghi said: "The payments industry is undergoing a fundamental change as the very nature of commerce is redefined. The landscape is evolving from payments to digital payments to digital commerce, which means targeted, personalised offers in the relevant contexts from marketing and advertising, the ability to do transactions online, offline and on mobiles with an underlying social element, and, post-transaction, loyalty and awards.
"Our global network of businesses and consumers, international employee base, world-class customer service and data analytics will provide a significant advantage to potential portfolio companies. We can bring to the table a one-stop partner able to play in a global context.
"The future is uncertain as to who the competition will be as there are new entrants in commerce. Who could have anticipated Google would be in mobile phones three years ago? Technology enables and makes financial services happen – look at debit card swiping – and data is key and the software by which it is accessed."
Amex is competing with a reinvigorated Visa’s strategic investments team, while money transfer specialist Western Union set up a ventures unit this year to boost innovation.
Citi now has 25 people in its Ventures team, primarily in the Valley after a wave of hiring from venture capital firmsand other corporations, as it tries to help the bank become more organically innovative and incubate new ideas as well provide capital to fund the best third-party entrepreneurs. Citi Ventures has been ranked the most influential corporate venturing unit of a financial services company for the second year (see profile in related content and table – click here).
Citi’s decision to follow the venture epicentre could help the bank reclaim its crown as the world’s largest bank by tapping into the growth of so-called gazelles, or fast-growing businesses, that in financial services have come from the Valley.
In an academic paper – Does Finance Bolster Superstar Companies? – published nearly two years ago, Alexander Popov at the European Central Bank said: "The US economy has traditionally been characterised by the rapid emergence of corporate giants, and this process became increasingly visible during the second half of the 20th century. While in 1960 the turnover among industry leaders (those in the top 20% of their industry based on market value) was around 5%, it increased to 10% in 1980 and to 20% in 2000."
Popov looked at the two most important financial developments in the US over the same period – bank deregulation of the 1970s and 1980s, and the emergence of a powerful venture capital (VC) industry since the 1960s – and found "a significant positive effect of venture capital finance, but not of bank deregulation".
He found firms with more than 100 employees grew larger in states with higher VC investment, but also their relative share has increased. "Therefore, venture capital investment affects the real economy rather through the creation and the subsequent coming of age of new firms.
"This has implications for the effect of finance on gradual versus disruptive innovation – while old companies are better in the former, new companies excel in the latter, and so venture capital brings forth the latter’s relative contribution to economic growth."
Popov said the world’s 500 largest listed companies included 26 US companies created after 1975 (out of a total of 168) and only three European companies created after 1975 (out of a total of 146).
He put the differences down to the explosion of VC in the US in the past 30 years and by the larger dependence of Europe’s corporate landscape on bank finance.
As the financial services sector evaluated the consequences of the systemic crisis caused by the credit crunch it has looked again at funding growth with equity-type products.
One investor said: "Now the leverage game is discredited if not quite over, we are back to growth from real business, not from shaving a percentage point off borrowing costs and extending leverage to the edge of the risk-reward cliff."
Eric Gisiger, investment director of Switzerland-based bank Credit Suisse’s SFr100m ($115m) corporate venturing unit, SVC – Ltd for Risk Capital for SMEs, said it was complementing the bank’s debt products by providing equity minority investments and unsecured subordinated loans to Swiss-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
He said it had been set up in response to the economic uncertainties. He added: "Credit Suisse’s annual survey among the Swiss population in 2009 found the key worry was unemployment, so one of Credit Suisse’s initiatives as a response as a good corporate citizen was to set up SVC – Ltd to invest in the country’s innovation backbone of local SMEs. The investment was to create and sustain viable employment by fostering innovation in Switzerland in a sustainable way, rather than money for crazy ideas.
"We have screened more than 630 opportunities in the 18 months since our formation and invested roughly SFr30m out of the SFr100m commitment in 20 companies. Although the SFR100m private capital initiative is using regulatory capital, Credit Suisse has just reconfirmed its commitment to fostering Swiss innovation in a sustainable way."
Other banks, such as Goldman Sachs, Zurich Cantonal Bank, Bank of America and the fivemain lenders in the UK, have also committed to funds that are designed to help SMEs or local communities struggling to access finance (see box on the Business Growth Fund, below).
However, financial services investors in venture capital have had poor returns on average, according to research by Harvard professor Josh Lerner after being attracted to the asset class for ancillary benefits,such as making loans to the entrepreneurs (see last year’s feature).
But this has not stopped investment banks from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley through to boutiques Allen & Co and Burrill from continuing to invest in entrepreneurs.
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs both announced funds of more than $1bn to back internet-enabled start-ups, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the sector itself has been attractive for entrepreneurs.
A number of financialservices specialists in the markets have also been looking at technology companies for deals, usually the business-to-business suppliers that can help them gain an edge in trading or dealing with clients and which can be lucrative deals in themselves. UK-based Icap set up its Euclid fund this year for this reason, following well-established successes by others, such as GFI and SIG Susquehanna.
Daniel Rosen, a principal at VC firm Highland Capital Partners, in an article for news provider Portfolio.com, said financial services-focused start-ups had received about $3.8bn between 2002 and 2008, and returned $19.4bn, divided almost equally between the profitsfrom initial public offerings (IPOs) of those portfolio companies and their sale to larger businesses.
California-based e-commerce provider Plimus was sold for $115m after $18m in venture funding and Visa bought Playspan for $190m after more than $42m in funding by a disparate group of investors including Vodafone.
In the past year, US retailer Wal-Mart floated its California-based, pre-paid credit card supplier, Green Dot, with a large first-day increase – or pop – in its share price, and online gambling provider Betfair raised about $200m in its IPO after backing from Japan-based conglomerate Softbank in 2006.
At the same time as Softbank was taking its 23% stake in Betfair five years ago, it ended its capital relationship with the financial services-focused SBI (see Q&A session with its chief executive).
While originally based in the UK, Betfair has been expanding in Asia and the region has been the source of disruptive innovation, including micro-finance for traditionally underserved people, or fingerprint authentication technologies to encourage mobile payments, such as Citi’s backing of China’s Live By Touch.
And while established financial services firms,such as Japan’s Daiwa, Mitsui and Mizuho, have had highly-regarded and well-established corporate venturing units for sometimes decades, a host of newer entrants from emerging markets, such as China, have been expanding their principal investment operations substantially, including China Life, as the region tries to grab the financial services crown from the US.
Box: Business Growth Fund steps in as SMEs’ friendly giant
The Business Growth Fund (BGF) was launched in the summer by five banks to invest up to £2.5bn ($4bn) in UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – its first investment was £4.2m in online reward and benefits firm Benefex.
The corporate venturing fund will invest between £2m and £10m in businesses with an annual turnover of £10m to £100m in return for a minimum 10% equity stake and a seat on the board for a BGF director.
The investing banks behind the fund are Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered. Santander pulled out to concentrate on its own regional investment policy.
The fund said it was considering its first 10 deals and over the next few years was expected to invest in hundreds of UK businesses from its offices in Birmingham, London and Edinburgh.
Stephen Welton, chief executive of the BGF and a former partner at investment bank JPMorgan’s former leveraged buyout unit, said: "In October 2010, the Business Growth Fund began life as a 37-word sentence published in the Business Finance Taskforce report.
"The rationale behind the BGF is that there is a gap in long-term equity capital. In recent years in the UK there has been excessive reliance on debt, which is attractive in buoyant economic times, and so there has been a consequence reduction of long-term capital.
"There is also a debate about bank lending and provision of working capital and how much businesses want to borrow. We are looking not to be a substitute but a provider of capital that requires different attitudes from companies. For some companies, having a partner is anathema or they do not need equity, but our view is there is a significant opportunity in finding and helping companies take on additional capital, which can also then help unlock bank capital, or in, say, the creative industries (10% of GDP) that have no assets to raise debt against.
"We are looking to be a long-term partner, which would not happen if we were a unit of a bank. By being an independent institution we have our own identity but with the support of powerful shareholders and £2.5bn.
"The money has been signed in legal documents and we draw down as share capital rather than as a limited liability partnership [used by most private equity firms]. At about £5m per company we can support hundreds out of a potential market of 10,000.
"But the BGF can bring more than money. There is an opportunity to provide advice and attract businessmen into small companies who are successful and wealthy and keen to help and can work alongside us as angels on boards.
"On exits, the old 3i [a UK-listed private equity firmand the forerunner of the BGF set up after the Second World War to provide equity capital] had problems and it is important that portfolio companies understand our objectives are not to provide capital indefinitely but to see what will be a sensible time to have return on capital, through dividends or five to seven years using instruments such as preference shares that redeem at certain points.
"We will have the ability to discuss but not force a sale. I am old-fashioned enough to think management counts and to persuade rather than dictate. Longer-term the BGF can become an incubator of smaller companies and help them to the next stage of development, such as private equity investment, flotationor sale. Partnering corporations can be part of that; private equity hates corporations as partners because of the exit, but we have different dealflow dynamics."