All IPO, a website designed to give UK retail investors access to IPOs, has found work on its first offering less than two weeks after receiving approval from the Financial Services Authority.
The system, based on technology developed by EO, the failed online investment bank started by John St John, until earlier this year the head of equity capital markets at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, will be used for the first time in the IPO of Israeli Acquisitor I, a shell company that plans to invest in Israeli businesses. It was due to list on Ofex, the UK's most junior market, on August 26.
All IPO provides registered users with information about forthcoming IPOs as well as prospectuses. Users can then chose to subscribe for shares using their debit cards. All IPO aggregates the orders and approaches bookrunners with the accumulated demand.
"Retail investors were, once upon a time, a large part of the stock market scene," says Clem Chambers, CEO of All IPO, "but that changed in the mid-1990s when regulators and exchanges allowed purely institutional offerings. Retail offerings just became too fiddly and expensive to do, so the general public were not able to get allocations."