Meet Our Team

Martin Nicholls

After Sandhurst and the Grenadier Guards, Martin moved into property development, and went on to acquire the classic British motorcycle maker Norton Villiers Triumph. He founded Greystone Technologies in Atlanta, building small-scale industrial gas plants, and later reverse-listed it into a Canadian mining company. With a former army colleague he built a manned-guarding business, took it through ISO 9000 certification, acquired several specialist security firms and sold the group to an industry buyer.

He retained the technical and IT security, due diligence and investigations divisions and used them to form the private equity arm of Oasis, which he founded in Dubai in 2008 as the holding structure for the ACS series of Cayman Islands debt funds. In the years that followed he acquired the Mayfair fund manager CAL Investments, founded Tier 1 FX and the trade-reporting platform Proliquidity, and established the brokerages XPrime Markets in London and XPrime Global Markets in Dubai. Those businesses were owned and operated separately from this firm; some have since been sold and the remainder are held outside it.

Martin is based in Singapore, where he leads the firm's corporate finance advisory practice.

John Earl

John has run complex operational projects across financial services and security. He was central to the launch of Tier1FX, a spot-markets brokerage within the group, where he specified and fitted out the trading systems, took the business through commissioning and recruited its senior leadership team. He has brought several businesses through approval processes and into operation on schedule and to budget.

A serial entrepreneur, he has built and profitably sold multiple businesses, including a document storage and electronic data company serving City law firms, accountancy practices and UK health authorities. He is a director and owner of Techmasters Security Services, which provides technical security to hedge funds, banks, UK police forces, the IPCC and other government bodies. His projects have ranged across oil and shipping companies, anti-piracy operations, Formula One teams and World Cup venues.

Heath Lansbury

Heath has more than fifteen years in private placement, venture capital, private equity and corporate finance, advising technology businesses on how to prepare for and structure institutional funding. His work covers equity and debt structuring, business development and investor readiness. Having been both a founder and an investor, he understands what a company has to be able to demonstrate before institutional capital will commit.

Hands-on and inquisitive, he presses founders to set out a clear growth roadmap and helps them build a case that stands up to scrutiny. He advises across sectors, with a particular interest in scalable, research-led businesses and in how growth-stage companies bridge to later-stage institutional capital.

Gerry Hoare

Gerry has more than thirty-five years in banking, asset-based lending, fintech and alternative finance. In recent years his work has centred on credit structuring, risk profiling and process design for fintech and alternative lenders, and he has advised the founders of several alternative lending and asset-based finance businesses through their growth. He leads the debt advisory team at Moorfields Capital, a separate firm, and works with a niche lender providing working capital to growing US businesses. He divides his year between the United Kingdom and Los Angeles.

Transactions he has advised on include a £75 million facility for a fintech lender and a £25 million package for a contract manpower provider. He has worked across haulage, manufacturing, construction, biosciences, cleantech and business services, and frequently helps management teams build the operational and risk frameworks that lenders expect to see.

Thomas Kimmeswenger

Thomas was born in the lakeside town of Zell am See in Salzburg, and holds a college degree in electronics and a master's in economics and business administration from Vienna University of Economics and Business. He spent several years with the Superfund Asset Management Group in Mauritius, working on portfolio management and global markets, before founding his own company.

He divides his time between Vienna and Tbilisi, which gives him a working view of both Western European and Caucasus markets, and a broad international perspective he brings to the firm's work in the region.

Edwin Presser

Edwin spent twenty-six years as a foreign exchange trader and as investment director for several funds. Over that period he worked through market cycles, financial crises and geopolitical shocks, and through the shift from voice to electronic trading, developing a close working knowledge of risk management, currency dynamics, commodities and equities.

He brings that market perspective to the firm's work on how a transaction is likely to be received by the institutions that fund it, and on the macroeconomic conditions that shape the timing and structure of a raise.

Ken Burns

Ken has more than four decades in corporate finance, with particular depth in asset-based financing. Over his career he has worked on financings across transportation, hospitality, gaming, manufacturing, mining, energy, housing, shipyards and other industrial sectors, and more recently in technology, including cyber security and AI-driven construction and development. He earned a business degree with a concentration in corporate finance from the University of Georgia.

He is one of the firm's longest-standing relationships in the United States, and advises on how capital structures should be put together for complex, asset-heavy transactions, combining rigorous financial analysis with a practical sense of what a lender will accept.

Kenny Goh

Kenny has more than thirty years of operating and commercial experience across Asia. He advises businesses in the region on growth strategy and on how they present themselves to funders, bringing a practical understanding of local business environments and of how transactions are done in each market.

He is based in Bangkok and works across Thailand and the wider region.