On The Line

Tom Coton's career hasn't followed a straight line. From PPE at Durham to audit, into fund administration at Langham Hall, and then a swerve into a chief of staff role at Terra Firma Capital Partners, before joining Climate Asset Management as its first fund operator on day one and building its finance function from scratch over the following five years. (Tom left CAM earlier this year.) In this conversation, Alice and Tom talk through the realities of being part of a nascent finance te...

Executive coach Cressida Hamilton returns to On The Line to unpick the most common communication failures operational leaders face, despite being subject matter experts. An executive coach who spent 26 years in financial services operations before moving into coaching, Cressida has spent the years since working with senior professionals on confidence and personal branding. In this episode, Cressida discusses why complexity, multiple stakeholders and a lack of structure get in the way o...

With Raj Shah, CFO & Operating Partner, Claret Capital Partners What does it actually take to scale a private markets firm, and what does that experience teach you about building the next one? Raj Shah joined 17Capital when it was a ten-person team managing an £88m debut fund. By the time he left, the firm was managing more than £20bn and had established NAV finance as a mainstream asset class. Earlier this year, Raj joined Claret Capital Partners as CFO and Operating Partner,...

CFO frustration with fund administrators has been building for a while, but is it really about the tech? Alice sits down with Justin Partington (IQ-EQ) and Matthew Devine-Hill (Belasko) to unpack legacy systems, co-sourcing traps, where Claude and Copilot are actually being used today, and why smaller managers might be ahead of the big institutions on tokenisation. Why CFO frustration with tech is rarely really about the technology itself The trap of co-sourcing and bespoke, sub-scale sy...

Ten years after spinning out of Index Ventures, Medicxi's CFO looks back at one of Europe's earliest VC continuation vehicles, and why he runs LP relationships himself. Giovanni Pericolini joined Alice on On The Line to mark ten years since Medicxi spun out of Index Ventures as its dedicated life sciences arm. Pericolini talks through the early days of building a finance function from scratch, the 2020 continuation vehicle that enabled Medicxi to hold onto six portfolio assets through t...