Seneca: Luck is when preparation meets opportunity

Ian Currie, the founder of boutique firm, Seneca Partners, talks to Investment Week's editorial director, Lawrence Gosling, about the opportunities to invest in companies being cut out of the traditional banking and finance routes.

How was Seneca Partners formed?  I started my career as an accountant at KPMG in the 1980s, but I always wanted to go into stockbroking. I was approached by Apax, the private equity group, to set up a corporate finance business in Manchester in the mid-1990s which we then sold.  More latterly I set up Zeus Capital, but I left in order to launch Seneca with some of my old colleagues who shared the same philosophies about what businesses really needed post the 2008 financial crisis. We wanted to build a corporate finance business, where we invested our own capital alongside our investors...