Epiris sells Saunderson House in £150m trade sale

Harriet Matthews
24 June 2021

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Epiris is to sell financial advisory firm Saunderson House to Rathbone Brothers in a deal that values the company at ТЃ150m.

The deal is expected to close in Q3 2021.

Epiris acquired Saunderson House as part of IFG Group in a take-private deal in 2019 for £206m. The GP subsequently divided IFG into its two units: Saunderson House and pensions administrator and investments platform James Hay Partnership. The GP will continue to hold a stake in James Hay Partnership.

Epiris acquired IFG via Epiris Fund II. The vehicle held a final close on £821m in October 2018 and was 70% deployed as of June 2021, according to Unquote Data. The fund deploys equity tickets of £40-150m, investing in UK businesses with enterprise values of £75-500m.

The deal is the second realisation from Epiris II; the GP sold magazine and digital publisher TI Media to trade buyer Future in October 2019 for £140m, ending a holding period of around one and a half years.

Company
Founded in 1968 and headquartered in London, Saunderson House provides financial planning and investment management services for 2,200 private clients, managing assets of around £4.7bn.

According to its publicly available financial statements for 2019, the company generated turnover of £34.7m that year, versus £34.3m in 2018. The company posted pre-tax profit of £5.5m in 2019, compared with £2.2m in 2018.

People
Saunderson House – Tony Overy (CEO).
Epiris – Owen Wilson (partner); Bill Priestley (chief investment partner); Zoe Lai (investment manager).

Advisers
Vendor – Fenchurch Advisory (corporate finance); Macfarlanes (legal); PwC (financial due diligence).