EIS Navigator Podcast: EIS & VCTs and how 2023 is shaping up

Despite hopes that we may have a quieter year, 2022 turned out to be much more dramatic than 2021. The EIS navigator team has got another all-star panel to discuss what happened.

Christiana Stewart-Lockhart, Director General of the EIS Association, Neil Cole, Head of Private Markets Distribution UK, UBS Wealth Management, and Kealan Doyle, Director of Symvan Capital join Brian to pick through the events of 2022 and the prospects for 2023.

We chat through what’s happened in fundraising, how demand for risk assets is going and how investors are viewing things. We also look at the effect of the falls in valuations, how the disconnection between public and private markets is being viewed and the balance between raising and deploying money. We also look at the renewal of the EIS and VCT schemes and the increase in SEIS limits, the progress in ESG and ask the panel to make some predictions for the year ahead.

Listen to the episode here:

Neil Cole is the Head of Private Markets Distribution UK at UBS Wealth Management. He has individual responsibility for the tax efficient investment world, focused on EIS, VCTs, inheritance tax, ISAs, and other relevant product types, and provides recommendations to UBS Advisers on which of these products should be offered.

Kealan Doyle is CEO and co-founder of Symvan Capital. He has worked with venture capital companies for 15 years, both in a corporate finance advisory capacity as well as a fund manager. He prefers to invest in a wide range of technology companies, but is also very interested in finding synergies within the Symvan portfolio of companies. Before his involvement in venture capital investing, Kealan previously lead a structured equity products team at HSBC, and has worked at Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and UBS. Together with Nicholas Nicolaides, he has since founded his own entrepreneurial businesses to focus on VC investing. Kealan holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the University of Toronto.

Christiana Stewart-Lockhart is the Director General of the Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA). She previously spent more than a decade working in Westminster including ten years at the Institute of Economic Affairs. She also founded EPICENTER, a Brussels-based network of some of the most respected think tanks from across Europe. Christiana holds a BA in Politics from the University of York. She is a member of TISA’s Children’s Financial Education Policy Council and also sits on the Advisory Board for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship.