Conduit Club proves a lasting burden for Metro’s Frumkin

Metro Bank
Last orders

Metro Bank chief executive Dan Frumkin is unlikely to be on the guest list when the Conduit Club finds a new home.

Robert Devereux, Soho House founder and Conduit chairman, said he was “shocked” when Metro forced the £2,650-a-year private members’ club frequented by the likes of Paul Polman and Carrie Symonds to close last October over an unpaid debt. Even so, he and his co-founders wasted no time moving on, setting up a new business under the same name within a week.

Dubbed London’s “wokest” private members’ club, the Conduit boasted its more than 3,500 invitation-only members were “individuals tackling some of the most pressing challenges facing us today”. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were once courted to join its ranks.

For Frumkin, the original Mayfair spot is likely to be a burden for a while longer. The neobank lent the Conduit — which hosted David Cameron’s book launch and a glitzy fundraiser for Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign — about £10m in 2017. But it will be lucky to get half that back after the coronavirus crisis left the club unable to keep up with rent payments.

The bank this week said in full-year results that it had been hit due by a few substantial “single-name charges”, and City Insider understands the Conduit accounted for more than a third of the capital Metro set aside for soured loans in the second half of 2020.

If Frumkin wants to drown his sorrows and help speed up Metro’s recovery, he may be interested in the fire-sale organised by the Conduit’s administrators. Among the top-of-the-range food processors, pastry rollers and ice makers up for grabs is a “significant” amount of grand cru wine and luxury spirits.

Mark Wilson
Down with the kids

As chief executive of Aviva, Mark Wilson loved nothing more than to take visitors around the company’s digital garage in hip Hoxton Square in an attempt to prove that a 300-year-old insurer could get down with the kids. Think table football, exposed brick walls, posh coffee, that sort of thing.

Wilson left Aviva three years ago but his enthusiasm for all things digital evidently hasn’t waned. He has teamed up with private equity firm Sun Capital to launch Abacai, which is aiming to be “a leader in insurtech”. Abacai is planning to invest £50m in a new “AI-based insurance platform” and is also looking for acquisitions. Its first target is the £16bn-a-year UK motor insurance market. City Insider wonders if the company will be looking for a new office, perhaps somewhere in Hoxton Square, and whether Wilson has been practising his table football flicks.

Spacs
What’s in a name?

One of finance’s unwritten rules is that the rise of any opaque instrument is accompanied by a profusion of tortuous terminology — and so it is with Spacs, or special purpose acquisition companies. These blank cheque companies have already brought us the ugly concoction “de-Spac-ing”, to describe the transaction where a Spac merges with its target company.

The latest term doing the rounds among investment bankers is the “Spac off”, where — such is the competition among Spacs for the most prized companies — dealmakers acting for targets write up term sheets and send them to a range of would-be acquirers to see which makes the best offer. Following his calls this week to make London a more friendly environment for such deals, Xavier Rolet, the former chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, would presumably like to kickstart the Great British Spac-off.

But after a series of toppy valuations for recent Spac deals — promising huge rewards for sponsors, if not so much for retail punters — one FT wag suggests renaming them special purpose investment vehicles, or Spivs.