JellyWorks continues to invest in investment banking

Shore Capital has investments and clients in the telecoms, internet, and IT sectors and makes markets in approximately 165 smaller companies.

Bank Leumi UK, a subsidiary of one of Israel's two leading banking groups, also has a 29% stake in Shore Capital. Through their partnership, the two companies cooperate in providing research and corporate finance for Israeli companies.

This is JellyWorks' latest move as part of its core strategy towards building Europe's first online investment banking operation. Last week the company announced a 21.5m investment in VMR, a German corporate finance house, which controls 60% of Virtuelles Emissions Haus, an electronic public offering company. JellyWorks has also invested $3m in EPO.com, a Swedish pan-European online investment bank for electronic public offerings.

“What we've done over the last week is to invest in banks and banking environments,” said Jonathon Rowland, chief executive of JellyWorks. “This will allow us to identify interests in companies, analyse, advise and take them through to IPO. We'll have all these resources under one umbrella, we won't need outside help.”

The pan-European banking operation will be a core business for JellyWorks but it will be by no means the company's main business, according to Rowland. “We're looking at telecoms as well as other sectors,” he said. He also indicated that the company's future investments are most likely to be concentrated in the UK. “We've already opened ourselves up to eight different countries through our interest in VMR,” he said. The company's next move is likely to be “to take a bigger stake in Shore Capital”.