After 20 years in the stockbroking business, Simon Lyons stepped away from equities to enter the fixed income sector as a director of specialist group FIIG, offering an alternative for investors and an option to bank finance for business.
After 20 years in the stockbroking business, Simon Lyons stepped away from equities to enter the fixed income sector as a director of specialist group FIIG, offering an alternative for investors and an option to bank finance for business.
Mr Lyons was most recently at Argonaut Securities on the private client side of Perth boutique broker.
However his history includes time as a major player at Porter Western, which sold out to Macquarie Group when it entered Western Australia in a big way in the late 1990s, and also as a founder of Blackswan Equities, which was recently acquired by Euroz.
He now sees the opportunity to capitalise on changing market circumstances and a low-interest rate environment that favours fixed-income products such as bonds – a relatively underutilised market in Australia compared with jurisdictions such as the US and Europe.
“There are very few places investors can put their money to generate yield,” Mr Lyons told Business News.
“People want to be conservative, so they go to cash.”
Based on analysis of self-managed superannuation fund locations and his knowledge of the private client market, Mr Lyons estimates there are 60,000 high net worth individuals that could be in the market for FIIG’s products.
In addition, business is increasingly looking for financing alternatives to banks, which have been tighter and more fickle since the GFC.
Mr Lyons said FIIG had about $12 billion under management and looked to do corporate bond deals in the $50 million to $100 million range, although occasionally it would go outside those boundaries.
FIIG has been operating in Australia for 15 years but only established a beachhead in WA in 2011, appointing Liam Eames as state manager. Mr Eames left to join Western Union Business Solutions in 2012 and recently became WA state manager.
ASX-listed companies such as Cash Converters International have used FIIG to lead the arrangement of debt in the form of fixed coupon unsecured notes in recent times.
FIIG recently appointed Darryl Bruce and Katherine Cowell to its Perth office. Both have recently returned from the UK, where Mr Bruce worked as a fund manager for Brown Shipley and Ms Cowell was with specialist financial services-focused consulting business Adsatis.
Having lived through the GFC in London, where it hit financial services as hard as anywhere, Mr Bruce believes bond markets were an important alternative at a time when equity markets crashed and bank lending seized up.
“Certainly if you are going through another crisis having an active bond market provides insurance in difficult times,” he said.
