S & P Global this week completed its $1.8bn acquisition of London-based financial data provider With Intelligence. The deal, priced at some 30x EBITDA, reflected the growth of alternative (non-market) investments and the scarcity value of companies like Preqin (sold for an estimated 50x EBITDA in 2024) and With Intelligence (formerly Pageant Media). Both are focused on the investment classes that might account for some 30% of the industry but up to 60% of all fees. Alternative investments are hot.
For founder-CEO Charlie Kerr, the deal (seemingly, a mere dream when the Preqin sale grabbed the headlines less than 18 months earlier) was the culmination of a 27-year business that, in plain sight, had transformed itself successively from ads-funded trade magazines to events and then high-value transactional data, with 70% of revenue from subscriptions. The business had increased its 2022-25 revenue by almost 150% to £100mn (crucially, 70% from the US). Back in 2019, it had revenue of only £17mn and mostly in the UK.
But the October agreement to sell the pe-controlled business was even more significant for Kerr than the proceeds from which he is believed to have received some £200mn. The deal was signed on the second anniversary of the death of his father who – as newspaper obituaries gleefully observed – was the only former ‘peer of the realm’ to have been a bus driver. As Lord Teviot, Kerr’s father had inherited the title from his own father who had made and lost a fortune as a share dealer and political power broker. That’s why the son became a bus driver. Even that episode was eventful for the family because, that’s where he met his wife (Charlie Kerr’s 90-years+ mother) a bus conductor who had once been a tennis star, competing at Wimbledon. Yes.
You couldn’t make it up.
Charlie Kerr – having now made a fortune dwarfing that once lost by his grandfather – was this week in a euphoric but nostalgia mood. As he prepared to celebrate the exit with a lengthy family trip to Australia and New Zealand for the cricket and Christmas, Kerr used the S&P deal completion to announce that he was now assuming his father’s name and would become Charlie Teviot, though he really is “Lord Teviot of Burghclere in the county of Southampton”. How’s that for someone who quit school at 16?
It’s a story made for Netflix. But we should be interested in what comes next from Teviot/ Kerr’s new investment vehicle (Bueghclere Ltd) “which will put together a portfolio of B2B data assets. if you have any acquisition or partnership opportunities…”
Having spent half his life building what became a high-value information business, he’s not about to give up now.
He’s started by buying, from his former company, EGR Global which claims to be “the world’s leading B2B publisher and membership networking group for the online gaming and gambling industry”. It had been one of the first brands launched more than 20 years ago by the former Pageant Media. The financials (below) tell the story of an almost hidden but highly-profitable e-gaming information business (now funded by subscriptions and events) which the outgoing CEO is believed to have acquired from S&P for less than £10mn. Another coup.
| EGR Global (Pageant Gaming Media) | |||
| Yr end Feb £mn | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 |
| Revenue | 6.0 | 5.5 | 4.6 |
| Op profit | 3.8 | 3.5 | 1.9 |
| Margin | 63% | 64% | 41% |
| People | 7 | 8 | 9 |
But that’s just the start of his new business as an investor. Charlie Teviot (get used to it) is commissioning the UK-based Plural Strategy to identify sectors where he could develop the kind of news+data+events that he did at Pageant/With Intelligence. At a time of soaring valuations for data, he reckons that only a combination with news and relationships can actually insulate information companies from the ravages of AI machines.
He talks of identifying sectors without an existing “bible” of news, information and data. He won’t, of course, be doing this in his former financial sectors. But, in many ways, his approach will be the one that he perfected at With Intelligence: buying and building comprehensive, one-stop information services through a combination of exclusive information and more freely-available data, wrapped in news and events.
Teviot may, therefore, become a distinctive investor in the UK, taking minority shareholdings in post-startup B2B companies which can become the providers of “bibles” in markets across the world. But his views on how – in the age of AI data scraping – mere industry news, ‘soft’ data and human relationships may actually become the vital competitive edge are a yet more interesting vision for business information investors everywhere.
