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Fairstone Group to add 20 new faces to Boldon HQ following £25m investment

South Tyneside-headquartered Fairstone Group, a national firm of independent financial advisers, has secured a £25m investment from private equity investor Synova Capital.

Founded in South Tyneside in 2008, Fairstone is made up of 260 financial advisers throughout the UK servicing 25,000 private clients with £5.8bn of assets.

The business will be bringing 20 new staff to its headquarters on Boldon Business Park, as well asincreasing the scope of its buy-and-build programme with the investment.

As part of this recruitment drive, Fairstone intends to strengthen its existing links with Northumbria University by bringing in more high quality graduates into the business.

Synova has in excess of £400m in its current funds and this is the first transaction to be completed from their third fund. This latest deal sees Synova continuing its strategy of investing in forward-thinking companies operating in attractive market sectors with clear prospects for earnings growth and value creation.

Fairstone Chief Executive Lee Hartley said: “Synova’s investment signifies an exciting gear change in Fairstone’s build plan and demonstrates our appetite to complete more and larger buy-out deals over the short to medium term.

“We are committed to working with high quality firms, with meaningful levels of assets under management, who want to drive their performance upwards and realise optimum value for their business.

“Our entire management team is obviously delighted to be working with Synova and this project has taken several months of careful planning. Synova has a proven track-record in investing into highly scalable and technology leveraged businesses like Fairstone.”

The transaction also sees a realisation by several early stage shareholders in Fairstone all of whom have received substantial returns on their initial investments. In parallel, Committed Capital, North-East based Northstar Ventures and two family offices have retained equity positions, meaning that Fairstone will continue to benefit from a suite of financial backers.

This deal was supported by a suite of North East based professional advisers which included Muckle LLP, CAVU Corporate Finance, UNW and the Newcastle office of EY.

Alex Bowden, Partner at Synova and newly appointed Director of Fairstone, added: “Widespread change across the financial services sector has paved the way for new and innovative business models like Fairstone to develop. Against the backdrop of ongoing professionalisation and technological advances, exciting opportunities exist for quality operators to evolve into real market leaders.

“Fairstone already has a strong standing within the sector and is now one of the largest Chartered financial planning firms in the UK.”

He added: “We are delighted to be partnering with Fairstone as the business builds upon its highly successful acquisition programme.”