David Schwimmer, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange Group PLC (LSE:LSEG), has gone to bat for the Square Mile in a bid to dispel fears that the junior AIM market is on borrowed time.
“AIM is the most successful growth market in Europe and a key part of the financing infrastructure of the UK,” Schwimmer told the Evening Standard in a Tuesday interview.
“Since its launch almost 30 years ago, over 4,000 companies have used AIM to take the next step in their growth journey, raising around £135 billion in that time.
“We continue to see a strong pipeline of companies from around the world interested in joining the market.”
Schwimmer noted that AIM, long considered the premier growth engine of Europe, remains considerably more influential than any other junior trading venue on the continent.
Yet AIM has battled a severe drought in 2022 and 2023, with delistings piling up and more and more companies searching out greener pastures in the US capital markets.
Tech companies, in particular, have been critical of London’s lack of support for growth companies.
Arm Holdings’ co-founder Jamie Urquhart infamously rubbished the government’s long-term tech strategy just a day before announcing a New York listing in a major snub to the City of London.
It “couldn’t be any worse than it is at the moment”, he said in March. “Even now we are waiting for the government to come out with a semiconductor strategy… There’s very little here in the UK and on the things we are worried about, the Chinese already own them.”
Symbolic of London’s inability to retain top tech companies, SoftBank-owned Arm is now gunning for a $70 billion valuation through a Nasdaq listing.
Regardless of the recent transatlantic shift, “the City has a way of reinventing itself. It has done so over hundreds of years”, Schwimmer exclaimed.
As part of the City’s latest reinvention, LSEG has thrown support behind a new trading venue, tentatively called the Intermittent Trading Venue, touted for a 2024 launch.
This ITV (name subject to change) will serve as a venue linking privately held companies with liquidity from institutional investors.
“A new venue offering intermittent liquidity would solve a very real problem by bridging the gap between the private and public markets, creating a genuine boost to the scale-up economy in the UK and for any company that wishes to grow here,” LSEG’s head of new primary markets Dr Darko Hajdukovic previously stated.
Schwimmer says the ITV will “have the potential to supercharge the scaling of our venture financing ecosystem”.