Winterflood has been featured in the Global Capital article: ‘UK takes ‘first step’ to up retail access though sovereign lags EGB peers’. The article discusses how the Winterflood Retail Access Platform (WRAP) helped in enabling retail access to new gilt issues.
Hargreaves Lansdown and Interactive Investor used WRAP for this gilt issue, which enabled retail investors to purchase the gilt at primary market prices. This is the first new gilt issue that has been made available to retail investors in this way and demonstrates Winterflood’s commitment to championing retail investor inclusion across all markets and instruments, with WRAP able to distribute both equity and debt securities.
Michael Smith, Debt Capital Markets at Winterflood said: “We want to facilitate access to the primary Gilt market for retail investors. It took us nine months of work to get us to the position where we could offer individuals access to the same pricing mechanisms that the wholesale community enjoys.”. He also added that demand had “exceeded expectations multiple times over”.
The article also displayed the support of Sir Robert Stheeman, CEO of the Debt Management Office (DMO) who welcomed retail investors inclusion. Further to this, Tim Jacobs, Head of Primary Markets at Hargreaves Lansdown noted the “massive increase in individual investors buying gilts in the secondary market” further stating “it was right for us to offer this to our clients”.
If you would like to discuss the article or topic in more detail, please contact: Michael Smith, CFA, Debt Capital Markets at Winterflood Securities
