Here is a story about private equity doing something it rarely does neatly: exactly what it said it would.
When Epiris paid some £500-600mn, in late 2022 ,for the non-Fastmarkets ‘half’ of the UK listed Euromoney – the sprawling, unloved remainder of a once high-performing listed company – the market’s reaction was polite indifference.
Thirteen businesses spanning insurance intelligence, aviation finance, derivatives data and tech events, bound together by little more than a shared London address and, arguably, a common history of under-exploitation. The multiple was around 8x EBITDA: cheap by any measure for a susbscriptions-rich portfolio, but understandable given the complexity.
Three and a half years later, Delinian – as Epiris rebranded its acquisition – has become one of the most instructive case studies in the recent history of B2B media, events and data. Not because it transformed its businesses into something unrecognisable, but because it did something much harder: it understood exactly what it had bought, prepared each business with unusual discipline, and sold them, one by one, at prices that have – almost certainly – already returned the entire original investment – and with the five largest and most valuable assets still to go.
To understand Delinian, you have to understand its twin.
The £1.6bn Euromoney acquisition in 2022 was, in reality, two deals in one. Astorg wanted Fastmarkets – the commodities pricing agency that had grown out of the PRA pioneer Metal Bulletin – and wanted it badly enough to pay what is now believed to be approximately £1bn-£1.2bn, or around 35x EBITDA, for it. That burning ambition had a direct consequence for Epiris: it acquired the rest of Euromoney’s portfolio for something close to book value.
Fastmarkets was 88% subscriptions, a PRA leader with pricing authority in metals, agriculture and forest products, and a clear M&A growth runway. Delinian was messier: 55% subscriptions, 33% events, 16 businesses across 12 sectors, each with its own culture, its own competitive dynamics and its own very particular definition of what it actually sold. No rational acquirer would have bought Delinian as a growth platform. Epiris did not pretend otherwise.
The Delinian plan, stated plainly from the start, was to invest in each business individually, strengthen its standalone management, prepare it for sale – and sell. Not after the customary 3-5 years of strategic repositioning, but continuously, from Day One.
That distinction matters more than it might appear.
Delinian was never managed as a group in any meaningful sense. From early 2023, the businesses were given their own executive committees, their own P&Ls and, in the majority of cases, their own new or substantially refreshed leadership. Ten of the 16 portco CEOs were either externally recruited or promoted into the role within the first 18 months. Data rooms and Information Memoranda were prepared in parallel – not as a theoretical exercise, but as live documents, updated continuously, ready for a bid at any point.
The architecture of the central team reflected this single-minded purpose.
Henry Elkington, installed as non-executive chair, had been through this before: as CEO of AXIO Group, the data services carve-out from the former UBM that Epiris had backed a decade earlier, he had spent four years disaggregating and divesting a portfolio of medical, aviation and forest products data businesses, ultimately returning over 5x invested capital.
Delinian was, in some respects, the sequel. Andrew Pinder, recruited as group CEO in early 2023 from Investec where he had led UK investment banking, was a dealmaker rather than an operator by background – a deliberate choice that signalled the direction of travel as clearly as any strategy document. The CFO, Richard Kerr, had over 100 transactions to his name across stints at the former Dennis Publishing, Guardian Media Group and Advanced Computer Software Group. Marc Payne, formerly Chief Strategy Officer at former listed events group Ascential, made up the triumvirate when he joined in mid-2024.
This was not a management team assembled to manage a media company. It was assembled to sell one.
The programme began in earnest in the autumn of 2024, and what has followed has been methodical, well-sequenced and – on the available evidence – remarkably well-priced.
The first two transactions set the tone.
IMN, the North American real estate events platform, went to Informa in September 2024 for an estimated £100mn. IJGlobal, the infrastructure finance data business, was acquired by Green Street in the same month for around £50mn – at the high-end of expectations and, by some accounts, following a bidding war. Together, these two disposals reportedly produced a combined book profit of £70mn: a strong early signal of the gap between Epiris’s entry price and what individual buyers would pay for focused, market-leading assets.
The pace accelerated. Insurance Insider – provider of deep data and analysis to the global P&C insurance market – was sold to ECI Partners in December 2024 for an estimated £160mn, the largest single disposal to date. The Deal, the US M&A intelligence platform, followed in February 2025, acquired by With Intelligence for around £60mn. Invisso – the structured finance events business whose Global ABS and ABS East franchises bring together over 16,000 delegates annually – went to FT Live, the events arm of the Financial Times Group, in March 2025 at an estimated £80mn. Here was a buyer for whom the brand enhancement was as valuable as the revenue: a natural home, and with a price to match.
The second half of 2025 brought three further exits. Legal Benchmarking Group went to the then-emerging Triple Private Equity in June for around £50mn. Airfinance Global was divested in July through a merger with Ishka, backed by Foundation Investment Partners.
Then, in March 2026, came the most significant tranche yet: the simultaneous sale of Derivia Intelligence, Extel and the Euromoney brand itself to Triple Private Equity in three separate transactions, valued in aggregate at a whopping £325mn. Derivia had itself been quietly enlarged in November 2025 when GlobalCapital was folded into it ahead of the sale – a small but telling example of the portfolio tidying that has accompanied the whole programme.
The buyer’s identity is worth a pause.
Triple Private Equity, obviously happy with the first acquisition, came back for more, much more, and has now acquired four Delinian assets in under a year – Legal Benchmarking Group, Derivia, Extel and the Euromoney brand – making it, in effect, a parallel aggregator of Delinian’s financial intelligence businesses, including the purchase of The Lawyer from Centaur Media in September for a further £43mn. That, too, is a story that will be worth telling.
Delinian disposals: completed and announced
| Company | Sector | Buyer | Date | Est. price* |
| IMN | Real estate events | Informa | 9/24 | £100mn |
| IJGlobal | Infrastructure finance data | Green St | 9/24 | £50mn |
| Insurance Insider | P&C insurance intelligence | ECI Ptnrs | 12/24 | £160mn |
| The Deal | US M&A data | With Intelligence | 2/25 | £60mn |
| Invisso | Finance events | FT Group | 3/25 | £80mn |
| Legal Benchmkng Group | Law firm benchmkng | Triple Private Equity | 6/25 | £50mn |
| Airfinance Global | Aviation finance data | Foundtn IP /Ishka | 7/25 | £20mn |
| Euromoney Learning | Banking/ finance trng | WallStreet Prep | 8/25 | £25mn |
| Derivia, Extel & Euromoney† | Derivatives data / benchmarks | Triple Private Equity | 3/26 | £325mn |
| DISPOSED | £900mn |
If the disposals so far have been the appetiser, the remaining five businesses are the main course. And they are, by some distance, the most valuable parts of what Epiris originally acquired:
NDR – Ned Davis Research – is the smallest of the five and is currently in the market. A highly specialised investment research platform with a concentrated and deeply dependent customer base, it is likely to attract trade interest from asset management intelligence providers. Estimated value: £40mn-50mn.
Institutional Investor, the legendary brand serving the asset management community through events, research and intelligence, is believed to be approaching sale readiness. Trading is strong. Estimated value: £200mn-225mn.
Techoraco – the world’s largest digital infrastructure events business, with flagship properties including ITW, Capacity and Datacloud – is growing rapidly and has recently strengthened its executive team. Timing has been shaped by the broader events M&A market; the uncertainty around other large events transactions has given trade buyers reasons to pause. Epiris, however, is in no hurry: every additional quarter of Techoraco’s ownership is accretive. Estimated value: £200mn-225mn.
BCA Research, the global macro investment research platform, combines institutional depth, high subscription renewal rates and global reach. A premium asset for any buyer in the investment intelligence space. Likely a 2027 transaction. Estimated value: £325mn-350mn.
Altrata is the people intelligence group assembled from five acquisitions – BoardEx, Wealth-X, Boardroom Insiders, RelSci and WealthEngine – that Euromoney made over the years without ever properly integrating. Building a single product from five legacy data architectures is not a trivial undertaking, but the work is now reportedly close to completion. Altrata has always been designated as the last to go, and it is also the largest single asset remaining. It is the crown jewel that Epiris has been polishing since 2022 and is likely to go next year, or possibly 2028, and may well end up with remaining Delinian group functions of finance, HR and IT. Estimated value: £400mn-450mn.
Delinian: the remaining five
| Company | Sector | Likely timing | Est. value £* |
| Ned Davis Research | Investment research | In market now | 40–50mn |
| Institutional Investor | Asset mgmt events & intelligence | Q2/3 2026 | 200–225mn |
| Techoraco | Digital infrastructure events | 2027 | 200–225mn |
| BCA Research | Global macro research | 2027 | 325–350mn |
| Altrata | People intelligence (BoardEx, Wealth-X) | 2027 | 400-450mn |
| TOTAL REMAINING | £1,250mn |
On mid-point estimates across the remaining five, the total unrealized value is approximately £1.25bn. Add that to the roughly £900m from completed disposals and the cumulative realization from Epiris’s original £500-600m investment points to a total somewhere in the region of £2.1bn.
And when the debt is deducted, the AXIO benchmark – 5x invested capital – should be comfortably in reach!
What makes Delinian distinctive is not the individual transactions – many of which were pre-emptive bids rather than formal processes – but the design of the whole. The structural separation of 16 businesses from a shared services model. The deliberate sequencing, with smaller and less complex assets moving first to establish momentum and price benchmarks. The unusual transparency of the process internally, which kept morale intact and management teams incentivised. The conscious investment in leadership – new CEOs where needed, promoted talent where possible, a central team whose skills were forensically matched to a disposal mandate rather than an operating one.
And the patience.
Several of the most valuable assets – Altrata, BCA Research, Techoraco, and Institutional Investor – have been held back. Not because they were difficult, although some of them were, but because they were worth waiting for. The discipline to resist early bids for your best businesses, when returns from earlier sales are already banking handsomely, is rarer than it sounds.
The former Euromoney was, by its ignominious end, a company worth (much) more in parts than as a whole. Epiris recognised that before anyone else, paid a price that reflected complexity rather than quality, and has been proving the point ever since.
Astorg got the prized Fastmarkets. But Epiris may have got the better deal. A real case study.
