The Pollen Street Capital Group is a global, independent alternative asset investment management company focused on the financial and business services sectors, with significant experience in specialty finance. It was established in 2013 and now has £2.7bn gross AUM across private equity and credit strategies. Our investors include leading pension funds, asset managers, banks and family offices from around the world.
In financial services, technological innovation and changing consumer behaviours are creating opportunities to build specialist businesses that serve well-defined target markets.
We help our partner companies to take advantage of these opportunities and to build high growth, sustainable businesses that deliver a compelling proposition to their customers within carefully selected markets.
We partner with entrepreneurial management teams who share our values and whose businesses have strong potential for growth and market share expansion.
Thanks to deep experience in financial and business services, we aim to contribute market, product and process expertise as well as capital to create value for our portfolio companies and our investors.
We are partners, not just investors.
Gross assets under management
We aim to deliver consistent and superior returns for our investors by working with and building market-leading businesses.
Our team sets the bar high, identifying excellence and working closely with chosen partners, bringing specialist knowledge and best practice in a complex and changing environment.
We aim to create valuable, sustainable and robust businesses by applying the following practices and principles:
We work closely with management teams, counterparties, customers and service providers to become a strong and enduring contributor to the value chain.
In addition, The Pollen Street Capital Network (PSC Network), our unique eco-system built through our many years of interactions and investments across the industry, gives us access to deal flow outside the mainstream, highly competitive processes. The PSC Network is also a trusted resource for our partner companies to share best practice and innovation insight in a fast-changing environment.
Pollen Street’s investment gave us funding, of course, but it also gave us access to a much greater level of expertise and connectivity. With their help, we intend to be the number one specialist provider of debt finance to SME businesses in Ireland.
Pollen connects people, expertise and businesses in a way that complements our team’s skills and resources. They bring unparalleled sector expertise and a blend of high energy and commercial pragmatism. Their engagement and insight across the business has been instrumental in refining as well as executing on our strategy.
The Pollen Street team has a strong heritage in supporting the rapid growth of specialist businesses in the financial and business services sector in Europe, and we are looking forward to working with them to develop BIK’s industry-leading services and expanding further within our chosen specialist markets.
Pollen Street Capital invested in May 2016 after spending time with our team and gaining a detailed understanding of the business. The investment has been transformational for us with 1st Stop more than doubling sales and EBITDA in the past two years. Pollen Street worked collaboratively to make some major strategic decisions, changing the shape of our business. They have dedicated significant capital and the internal resource of their highly skilled team to help develop all aspects of our business. The team do what they say they’re going to – a very refreshing trait for an ambitious business; PSC are a valued partner.
We are delighted to be working with Pollen Street whose depth of experience in payments and particularly international payments is second to none. In the short time we have known them their strategic input, connectivity and ambition has been clear and the specialism in financial services has already brought a wide set of opportunities for us.
Pollen Street Capital understands the importance of embedding responsible, ethical and sustainable business practices into everything we do. We recognise the impact we can have on our customers, investors and the societies and geographies in which we operate and have developed an Environmental, Social and Governance Policy (ESG Policy) to outline the principles that we follow to address this.
These principles are integrated into both our everyday working environment and our investment committee and due diligence processes when evaluating new opportunities. We look to our team, partners and investee companies to adopt and live the principles of our ESG Policy.
In developing that ESG Policy, consideration was given to the United Nations supported Principles for Responsible Investment and the related ESG Policy priorities of our investors and we review our ESG Policy and report on performance against it on an ongoing basis.
Charitable Support
Outside of our investment activities, PSC has identified two charities Rainbow Trust Children's Charity and CHICKS which we will be supporting in 2018/2019. These charities were selected by our employees as organisations whose aims and values we share, and we look forward to helping them further the important work they do.
