“Guilty until proven human.” That was the title of a session at this year’s e-Assessment Association conference in London, and it captured the anxiety being felt in the testing and exam industry. AI is not only being built into authoring, marking and proctoring, the same tech is now in every candidate’s pocket, threatening exam integrity. A week later I was sitting on a panel at EdTechX, where investors were circling the same problem from the other side: with AI changing everything, which of these businesses is backable?
Following our recent investment in Paragin Group, the Benelux market leader in high-stakes exams and assessment software, my two conferences in a fortnight among their peers, buyers and regulators sharpened my conviction about where the value in the market will sit.
1. Innovation needs depth
At the conferences, every vendor is demoing the same features: AI that drafts questions, AI that grades them, and AI that flags suspicious behaviour. Most of it is a thin layer over the same large language models that anyone can license. If your product is just veneer on a model your competitor can call tomorrow, that’s not sustainable differentiation.
The businesses that stood out did the opposite to this. One UK-based provider, Risr, had trained its AI on deep, privileged medical training content in partnership with RCGP. Together, they developed an AI patient with an optional AI coach to help trainee GPs through simulated patient consultations to prepare for their final practical exams, something a general-purpose model cannot replicate without the underlying case bank. On my panel, this was the overarching theme - AI is an advantage where it sits on vertical depth, e.g. proprietary content or genuine domain expertise, where you know your customers’ workflows better than your competition. That last 10% of depth in customer knowledge is what impressed us most about the Paragin team. It leads to genuine innovation that can’t just be reskinned. Paragin has built out the most complete solution set on the market; AI can help us deliver on our roadmap more quickly, but it is human expertise that gives the edge on its direction.
2. Integrity has to be the sell
Strip away the technology, and what an awarding body actually sells is confidence that a grade means what it says. England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, was unambiguous at the conference: its priority is trust in qualifications, technology comes second, and there are no guinea pigs when 800,000 students sit a GCSE on the same morning.
That is why the market will be conservative on AI adoption, and why owning the narrative on security and fairness is more important than features. This is also why outsiders underestimate the ease of disruption. You are selling to cautious buyers to whom brand trust is everything; it’s much more than just the hassle of changing systems. It’s much easier for an AI-native challenger to copy a feature than it is to displace loyalty, and that caution by buyers protects market incumbents who have an earned reputation.
3. Security and fairness are designed in
High-stakes testing is, at its core, a business built on trust with people’s most sensitive data. A set of results can decide whether someone qualifies as a doctor, an accountant or an engineer, so security, data protection and fairness have to be designed into the technology from the outset. Regulation is now formalising this, and under the EU AI Act, AI used to evaluate learning or to monitor candidates during a test is explicitly classed as high-risk, which carries real obligations around documentation, human oversight and demonstrable fairness. The recent move of that deadline from August 2026 to 2 December 2027 under the Digital Omnibus package changes the timing, not the direction of travel, and similar expectations are forming well beyond the EU’s borders.
For an investor, this is where track record and scale count. Building security and fairness into an assessment platform and being able to prove it is the work of years. Paragin has spent over twenty years wrestling with exactly these questions while continuing to innovate, and it has the scale to treat compliance and security as core to the product rather than a tax on growth. That hard-won experience, plus the resource capability to meet increased regulations, is difficult for a challenger to replicate.
For Paragin, this creates M&A and growth opportunities - as the bar on security and compliance keeps rising, many capable but sub-scale assessment businesses will struggle to clear it alone, and a platform that already takes these things seriously becomes the natural home for them to join. We can be a trusted and mission-aligned custodian of acquired businesses, with the scale to invest in leading edge group roles, like our newly appointed Cyber Security Engineer.
The sharpest test I heard in two weeks was the one put to our panel: can a business explain why it will still need to exist once AI is everywhere? In e-assessment, the answer, in my view, is that the winners over the next three to five years will be the ones that treat integrity and compliance as the point of the exercise rather than the price of it, because that is exactly what AI cannot commoditise.
Insights
07/07/2026
Rory Nath
Read Time: Min
Looking to the future of e-assessment
Identity verification has been the core of cybersecurity with one assumed truth: verify identity at the point of entry, then trust the session. The new wave of AI has weakened this faith, operating at machine speed to mimic behaviour and bypass controls, meaning identity must be continuously monitored and re-verified. With multi-step AI-assisted attacks rising 180% year-on-year in 2025 according to the World Economic Forum, this is something we see leaders in the cyber space reacting to quickly.
1. Continuous verification in Zero Trust architectures
Rather than assuming trust persists after authentication, Zero Trust architecture rejects the traditional “castle-and-moat” model of securing the perimeter and trusting everything inside it. Instead, it divides an organisation’s IT infrastructure into smaller, independently protected segments, each with its own verification requirements. This means that even if an attacker compromises one set of credentials, they face new authentication barriers at every boundary. Strong identity verification at entry remains important, but the main change is how the blast radius of compromised credentials is significantly reduced.
Compromised credentials are one of the most common causes of a breach. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report shows breaches linked to stolen credentials cost an average $4.81m and take over 290 days to detect and contain. They also stated that 93% of organisations experienced 2 or more identity-related breaches in the past year, highlighting the severity of the threat.
2. Widening attack surface
As organisations use more applications, operate increasingly in the cloud, and work remotely across multiple devices, the ways that their employees can be targeted are multiplying. AI is accelerating this by improving the quality of targeting through deepfakes and hyper-personalised phishing attacks, which make social engineering attacks more convincing than ever. Humans are a massive risk, which is why limiting devices and upskilling people through training and phishing simulations remains essential.
But alongside this, a second and distinct attack surface is emerging: the non-human one. AI agents can now autonomously identify what to access, determine the optimal moment to do so, and chain actions across systems without any human in the loop. This is very different from the risk profile of automation scripts in the past. As these agents act across customers' environments, cyber suppliers will increasingly be judged not just on whether an identity was verified at the start, but on whether loss of control was managed throughout: whether access was appropriately decayed over time, whether privileges were narrowed as risk increased, and whether the system could intervene mid-execution. Both perimeters are expanding simultaneously.
3. The next wave of identity shocks
Now, whether you believe that Mythos is as dangerous as Anthropic has outlined, or if it's just a clever marketing ploy, it is clear that as AI models get more sophisticated, so will the imminent danger to any cyber vulnerabilities. Bain characterises Mythos as a 'signal rather than the threat itself', which will expose under-investment in foundational cyber controls. A clear risk is how organisations govern the identity and access of their own AI agents. As businesses deploy copilots and autonomous agents across their operations, those agents need to be subject to the same identity verification and access controls as the people they work alongside. An agent that can access payroll data, financial records, or sensitive customer information when the human equivalent would be denied that access entirely — represents a significant governance gap. If not architected correctly, your own tooling can become a source of vulnerability.
This risk is compounded by an accelerating asymmetry in how attacks are developed and deployed. AI is enabling attackers to release malware at a scale and speed that was previously impossible, with little need for quality control. Cyber attackers have the privilege of pushing beta versions and seeing what works to iterate rapidly, while defenders need to rigorously test and ensure the solution can work across complex interconnected systems. AI widens this gap further, which is why any improvement in model capabilities further expands the exposure of vulnerabilities. There is an arms race underway, and those not investing in the foundational controls now risk being left behind.
Move beyond Mythos or any other next-gen model, and on the horizon is quantum computing. While it’s likely a decade away, companies are already adopting encryption algorithms that can withstand the onslaught of a quantum attack. In fact, Europe has already set a 2035 deadline for removing quantum-vulnerable cryptography, with some governments targeting 2030 for sensitive systems. While 2035 may feel like a long time away, there is growing concern around cyber attackers adopting a "harvest now, decrypt later" approach to collect encrypted data now, betting on future technology to decrypt and use it in attacks, meaning companies need to identify higher-risk encrypted data now and move to protect it ahead of time.
Insights
02/07/2026
Daniel Bailey
Read Time: Min
AI has changed the attack surface. How are cyber companies protecting their customers?
ECI was founded in 1976, at the very beginning of what would become the mid-market private equity industry in the UK. We feel incredibly proud of what the team has achieved over those 50 years: we are one of the longest-standing private equity firms in the UK; we’ve backed hundreds of management teams, delivering transformative transactions and exceptional returns for our investors. Here we draw on five decades of private equity history to highlight some of the changes both in the industry and our business, and our excitement about what comes next.
50 years ago this month
22 June 1976 – the first day of a long hot summer in which temperatures exceeded 32.2ºC for a record-breaking 15-day stretch. The average house price was £12,704, the average wage £72 a week and a pint of beer cost just 32p. It was the day ECI Partners was founded, forming one of the earliest linchpins of private equity in the UK.
In 1976 the UK private equity market was fragmented and institution led. There were fewer than 10 dedicated PE firms, which back then were divisions of merchant banks, government-backed institutions and investment arms, rather than the independent PE houses that have become the norm today.
ECI Partners (then Equity Capital for Industry) was established with backing from the Bank of England as one of the first institutional private equity providers bridging post-war development finance and modern buyouts. Our first fund, ECI 1, was £40m (a long way off our latest Fund, ECI 12, at £1bn).
Ken Landsberg, a former ECI Managing Partner, sets the scene: “Two oil shocks in 1974 and 1976 hit the stock market very negatively, and the Labour government decided to regulate the market to force investment. The Bank of England disagreed and helped raise a lifeboat fund to support companies, approaching 250 institutions, insurance companies and pension funds to raise a total of £40 million. A board was created from c.15 of the great and good in the city, including Tony Lorenz, and after a few years the management team agreed a change in strategy was needed. Tony suggested venture capital following his experience of what was happening in the US. The Board backed him, and in turn he became the first Managing Partner of ECI.”
Tony Lorenz went on to be one of the three founding members of the British Venture Capital Association (now UK Private Capital), and ECI was a founding member of the EVCA, its European equivalent. Their mission was to achieve industry recognition by government and regulators, to set standards and valuation norms and to achieve credibility with institutional investors.
The professionalisation of the industry
The early 1980s saw explosive growth in UK PE, driven by Thatcher era reforms, with pension funds, foundations and endowments starting to allocate to private equity, and the industry transitioning from niche to mainstream with investors like MIT and Greater Manchester Pension Fund.
Landsberg comments: “In the ‘80s we were investing across the board - startups, development capital, so-called buyouts, mid-market buyouts, big leveraged buyouts, even pre-startups, which were just a bit of paper and someone's idea. We got opportunities via the merchant banks, but you would also get calls from the street – everything from automatic bed making machines to flying cars. It was an enterprise economy, and there wasn’t much competition at the time from other investors.” This wider spectrum of opportunities led to the number of ECI’s deals increasing from 52 for the five-year period from 1980-1984, to 192 from 1985-1989.
How ECI's deal mix evolved
From generalist investor to focused mid-market growth buyout house
1980s — 8 deal categories, 244 deals
Capital invested in buyouts by decade
Buyout
Large buyout
Early stage
Expansion
Venture quoted
Start up
Aff'd funds
Other listed
1980s deals
244
across 8 categories
Buyout focus from
1990
Total buyout capital since inception
£3.3bn
† 2020s is a partial decade only — capital invested so far (2020–26).
By the end of the 1980s, the ECI team - who now had spreadsheets to analyse performance of deal types - was increasingly focussing on buyouts. Landsberg described it as a fundamental strategy change, “We shifted from a generalist to focussing on smaller or mid-market buyouts, and with it became much clearer on what we were looking for. Businesses with strong management, robust business models and sustainable growth markets.”
As the industry professionalised, more money flowed in, more Funds were set up, and ECI’s cheque size increased >750x from ECI 1 to ECI 12. It’s clear the PE industry now underpins the UK business environment that ECI was created to help support. But, in an industry where new names appear as often as familiar ones fade, how does a private equity firm last 50 years?
How to last 50 years in private equity?
1. Performance
Clearly you don’t get to last fifty years in this business without strong performance, and over ECI’s 50-year history, we’ve consistently outperformed the market, with five of our last seven realised funds in the top quartile for performance.
ECI vs UK private capital benchmark — DPI
Distributions to paid-in by vintage year
ECI
UK private capital benchmark
+ Premium over benchmark
2010 vintage
DPI
ECI
2.3x
All
1.4x
Premium+0.9x
2015 vintage
DPI
ECI
2.5x
All
1.4x
Premium+1.1x
2018 vintage
still harvesting
DPI
ECI
1.1x
All
0.4x
Premium+0.7x
ECI internal data as at June 2026. UK Private Capital benchmark as at latest reporting (June 2025).
That success doesn’t just drive our longevity; it’s created by it. Having supported over 200 management buyouts since inception - against a median of 96 total deals among the top 50 UK mid-market PE firms - and now deploying our 12th fund, where peers average just 5, the chances are we've seen a challenge or opportunity before.
It means we’ve been lucky to work with some amazing companies across our history, and nothing makes us prouder than seeing investments go on to be success stories long after our investment. Some might wonder what would have happened if ECI’s eight-year hold of Bloomsbury Publishing hadn’t ended just two years before they acquired the rights to Harry Potter... but really, we’re just proud to have been a small part of some fantastic business’s growth journey, and their long-term success is what makes this job so fun.
2. Proven succession model
According to a study by Josh Lerner and Diane Noble, PE founder tenure is unusually long at 19 years, with the study also showing that most LPs believe founders and leaders generally stay too long. Founder succession is a key question from LPs, as for many PE firms it’s unproven.
ECI has benefited from having solved the problem early, putting in place a managed succession model in 1999. That means there are four Managing Partners, with a new one joining and another moving into a non-exec role over a cycle. That means there are constantly fresh perspectives at the table, plus a clear roadmap to a leadership role for Partners, allowing the firm to deliver steady evolution and retain its top talent.
0%
of top 50 mid-market
PE firms are founder led
ECI Partners has had five successful leadership transitions over the last 20 years and has never experienced a team spin out in its 50-year history. In comparison, 52% of the top 50 mid-market PE firms are the product of a spin out, and 26% have had a spin out since they were founded. This is an inevitable product of GPs having a founder model where one or two Founders might stay for 15-20 years in a leadership role. ECI research shows that only 38% of the top 50 UK PE firms are non-founder led.
3. Evolution and investment
You don’t last fifty years in private equity by standing still. We continue to evolve. We were the first UK mid-market private equity firm to build out a dedicated Origination team and then a value creation team in our Commercial Team. Sean Whelan comments on the founding of the Commercial Team: “We designed the Commercial Team as we recognised that great management teams don’t always have the luxury of having time or spare people to help progress new ideas. An independent team that starts working with them during the deal, right in the commercial due diligence, straight into the strategy post-investment. It helps management teams move faster and grow quicker.”
And today we’re at a great catalyst point for investors being able to help management teams leverage the opportunities of AI and scale faster than before. Not only does our AI and Data toolkit help management teams directly, but it’s transforming how both ECI and its portfolio source deals as well.
Suzanne Pike from ECI comments: “To win in today's market, it’s essential to get relationships right - with management teams, founders, advisors, and subsector experts. Additionally, you need to make the best use of data, and this is a key ECI strength. Our CRM system was established more than 35 years ago, before many PE firms were even founded. Today our Origination Team is systematised, data- and AI-driven, and we have what we believe is the best AI origination platform in the market, Amplifind™. We saw the power of what we had built, and we wanted to be able to offer that to our portfolio to support their M&A activity as well, so we launched Amplifind™360. We’re the only mid-market PE firm to offer a proprietary tool like this to their portfolio.”
Looking ahead to the next 50 years
Insights
15/06/2026
Read Time: Min
Built to last: ECI Partners celebrates 50 years
TOPICS:
ECI50
One of the great parts of backing exceptional businesses, is watching what happens to them after our time working together. During our investment, we focus on helping management teams build the foundations for long term sustainable growth. And that means sometimes the most exciting part of their journey can still be ahead!
To mark our 50th, we thought we’d check in on a few companies we’ve had the privilege of backing over the years:
Citation
The investment in Citation in 2012 was driven by a recognition that the UK’s SMEs needed a friendlier and more reliable way to handle the essentials such as health and safety, HR, governance and regulation, and ISO certifications. We did a Management Buy-In, bringing in Chris Morris, who we had worked with as CEO of Laterooms, to take the reins from the founders who wanted to sell. This really was a team built on the strength of the ECI network, with five of the six hires introduced to help Chris create his new senior team coming from people we’d worked with previously. We supported on a company-culture project that saw Citation named a Sunday Times Top 100 Best Companies to Work For, backed two strategic acquisitions, and invested heavily in a first-of-its-kind online client platform that became a genuine differentiator. The customer base roughly tripled to nearly 16,000 SMEs and the team doubled in size. Chris is honest about the journey they went on when he joined: “It was a good product in a good market, but it was a fairly unambitious, fairly steady business and probably wasn’t making the best of what it had. We set about trying to change its culture, its ambitions, and its pace.”
We sold Citation to Hg in 2016, generating a 5.4x return - and since then it's only got bigger, evolving into the multi-brand Citation Group, attracting backing from the likes of KKR and HarbourVest, and growing into a global compliance services group, c.26x the size of when we invested. Chris, brilliantly, is still leading the charge more than a decade on, and it’s great to look back at what he said at the time about building the foundations for future growth and to see how far they’ve come: “ECI share my vision - and certainly that of our management team - of trying to build long-term, sustainable growth. It’s an intellectual approach, a value add approach, to think about what the business was at the time, what we’d like it to be, and what the steps to get there are - knowing that it’s not an overnight job and there’s no quick fix.”
Wireless Logic
We first backed Wireless Logic back in 2011, when investing in the "Internet of Things” would have sounded nerdy and sci-fi. We backed Oliver Tucker, the founder, in a £35m buyout and at the time it was the UK's largest independent player in machine-to-machine connectivity, run out of a corner of Buckinghamshire. We saw the potential for the business to scale across Europe as IoT devices continued to grow exponentially, and supported Oliver and the team to push into France, Germany and Spain. As Oliver explains: "Where ECI particularly helped us was in our international expansion. When we started, we were a UK-only operation, and through their help and guidance we expanded into Germany, France, and Spain. Their strategic input was also very valuable - they made us focus on key strategic decisions rather than trying to do everything, which you can be prone to do as a growing business.”
At the point of exit, Oliver said, “One of the biggest compliments I can pay the ECI team is that when we were looking at our next investor, what we wanted was simply a slightly bigger ECI to take us to the next stage.” We exited to CVC Capital Partners in 2015, delivering a 6.1x return. We stayed close with the Wireless Logic team. In 2020 we sold Arkessa, another IoT business (and by now could describe ourselves as an IoT investor without sounding nerdy or sci-fi!), to Wireless Logic to strengthen the combined Group’s route to market across Europe, creating a lovely full-circle moment.
Since then, the business has gone from strength to strength, from a c.£35m business when we invested, to a valuation now of c.£3.5bn. And it’s great to see Oliver Tucker, the founder we backed, still at the helm today, leading the business as it continues to scale across the globe.
Games Workshop
For this one we’re digging back slightly further into the archives. We backed the management buyout of Games Workshop all the way back in December 1991. The business had been founded by games fanatics who created a metal miniatures business – a sector that might have seemed rather unfashionable but had a loyal fanbase and was wonderfully cash-generative. It didn’t take long for the city to catch up on the growth opportunity, and after three years of investment the business floated on the London Stock Exchange, delivering a return of nearly 6x to ECI.
Since then, the business has kept rolling the dice (no pun intended) and today the maker of Warhammer is one of Britain’s greatest success stories. It joined the FTSE 100 in December 2024, clinched a deal with Amazon to bring the universe to film with Henry Cavill a self-confessed Warhammer nerd himself, and is now worth over £6bn. From a small company of hobbyists to one of the UK’s blue chips, it’s fantastic to have Warhammer lore as part of ECI history. A morally grey world of high stakes brutalist survival … (and fifty years in private equity!)
Insights
15/06/2026
Read Time: Min
Where are they now? Following the journey of ECI alumni
ECI Partners is marking its 50th anniversary in June 2026. Founded in 1976, when there were fewer than ten private equity firms operating in the UK, ECI has grown to become one of the longest-established names in the industry.
Over five decades, ECI's approach has been built on a disciplined investment strategy, a succession model designed for longevity, and a consistent track record of being first to identify origination and value creation opportunities.
As the industry enters a new phase shaped by AI, ECI continues to invest in the capabilities it offers management teams, in its origination and deal-winning capacity, and in the results it delivers for investors.
ECI at 50: The transcript
Tom Wrenn: Building successful businesses for 50 years. What's not to like about that?
Chris Watt: 50 years of ECI, I thought it would be good to get together as you know the four current Managing Partners in the business to reflect on the 50 years that we've had, what's made ECI the business that it is over that time and what we're excited about for the next 50 years.
David Ewing: 1976 was a long time ago, and it's a fantastic achievement.
Tom Wrenn: I feel like I've been doing this for some time and yet ECI was founded before I was even born.
Ken Landsberg: So I joined ECI in 1984, which was just eight years after it had been formed. The opportunities were sourced in a somewhat disorganised manner. Some were from phone calls from the street for the automatic bed making machine or the flying car. Seriously.
Tom Wrenn: When you think of the 50 years we've been around, we were founded before personal computing even existed. The iPhone was only 2007.
In the context of the 50 years ECI's been around, is phenomenal to think how the world has changed. You can't survive in private equity for 50 years by doing what everyone else does.
You've got to innovate, you've got to evolve, you've got to think ahead of what other people are doing and I think that's why we've been in business for so long.
George Moss: Many of our LPs date back to the 90s, and actually having investors who've backed us through multiple funds over several decades does give us a sort of sure footing.
Building our succession model
Sean Whelan: I've always felt that ECI's succession model really makes us stand out in the private equity industry. When did it all start?
Ken Landsberg: It was around 1990. We had one Managing Director, Tony Lorenz, and the team felt, in a sense, there was too much risk you know in one person. The Managing Director functions were spread amongst 3-4 people.
Chris Watt: There's four of us typically Managing Partners at any point, and we will make typically one change to that group each fund cycle. It means there's no single individual that is running the business, it's a collaborative enterprise. It works very well for us, and it's something that we've evolved over the years, and I think adds great strength and resilience to the business.
David Ewing: It is going to be owned by other people in the future and our job is to hand over that shirt in a better place than it was when we inherited it.
Building the commercial team
David Ewing: We do have the largest single strategy team in the UK. You know we've got a big team of people and we've been doing this for a long time. You know 50 years.
Sean Whelan: What we found was that great management teams have a lot of ideas but they don't often have the capability or luxury of having people sitting around that can actually take some of those ideas and turn them into a plan and execute on them. We decided to have some internal resource that we call our commercial team that would help those management teams.
Lewis Bantin: We were actually the first private equity firm to set up a dedicated value creation team here in the mid market in the UK and it's all about starting in the commercial diligence when we make an investment carrying that commercial insight into post deal when we're working with the team to help them grow their business. And that means we move faster, we build relationships quicker, we deliver faster and ultimately that should drive and has proven to drive better outcomes for investors.
Sean Whelan: So when I look back at my career at ECI I've always been very proud of what the commercial team has achieved.
Lewis Bantin: It was a critical design choice that we made all those moons ago and it's helped in a number of ways. It's helped us to win the best deals, it's helped us at times to say no to deals that we shouldn't do. We're now able to draw on five or six different points of specialist expertise as and when the companies need them.
Building the origination team
Suzanne Pike: To win in today's markets you need to get many relationships right. That might be management teams, founders,advisors, subsector experts and you need to make the best of your data and that has always been a real strength of ECI's.
We first implemented a CRM system over 35 years ago that had firm wide adoption and I think that's before many other private equity firms even came into existence.We know which businesses we want to back. We build the relationships around those really early. We used to wait for a business to come to market before meeting the management team now on average we are meeting those teams four and a half years ahead of a transaction.
Ken Landsberg: The origination team is a professionalisation of our investment sourcing. It's systemised, it's data-driven and now it's AI-driven as well.
Suzanne Pike: We began with machine learning and then we've continued to evolve to adopt deep research and Agentic systems and the new advancements in AI. We have the best AI origination platform in the market: Amplifind™. Once we saw the benefit of Amplifind™ in our own business, we wanted to make sure that the portfolio had access to that as well so we launched Amplifind™360. We are the only private equity firm in the mid market to offer a solution like Amplifind™ to our portfolio companies.
Chris Watt: Looking back on our track record that we've built over the years, it's something that we're really proud of here at ECI. Five of the last seven funds that we've had have delivered a net return of either 2x money or 20% IRR or better. That's a fantastic consistent track record that we built there.
David Ewing: We're here to build successful businesses, I mean that's our kind of strap line that we've had since you know 50 years ago.
Building an exceptional team
Lewis Bantin: The team makes all the difference at ECI. We have an exceptional team of real talent,
real depth, from a real diversity of backgrounds, all working together to deliver great outcomes for our investors.
Keith Landsberg: One can't overlook the team that's been built and many of the people in this company have been here for decades.
George Moss: That does feed into the heart of our culture I think and actually those long term relationships we have internally within the firm are a key part of that.
Chris Watt: I think it's telling that the the longest serving employee we have at ECI is Brenda, our receptionist who's infamous around the industry for the warm welcome that everybody receives when they walk through the door. I think it says a lot about the firm, that our longest serving employee is in fact our front-of-house person.
David Ewing: We think very carefully about our values at ECI. You know we are ambitious, and we're considered, and we're collaborative.
Tom Wrenn: We've always had a great collaborative spirit at ECI, and that's why I think we've endured for so long. The sum of the parts is way more than each individual person brings to the business.
Building another 50 years
Chris Watt: I'm looking forward to the next 50 years. There'll be plenty of challenges and opportunities available to us. Even looking back on just the last 12 months, we've raised our first continuation vehicle, we've also backed our first European platform deal, and that's what makes it so exciting being here. There's always the next chance, the next opportunity to look forward to.
David Ewing: Let's look forward to in 50 further years time there will be four other people sitting around this table.
Tom Wrenn: When I think about the next 50 years, what gets me excited is what's the next great business we are going to back, who's that next management team, founder, CEO that we're going to partner with. Businesses like CarTrawler, Wireless Logic, MiQ, the current portfolio that we've got that's doing great things. That's what makes us all excited about what we do and that's why we hope to be here for many years to come.
Insights
15/06/2026
Read Time: Min
ECI celebrates 50 years
TOPICS:
ECI50
Gareth Southgate has long acknowledged that selecting your squad is the hardest part of the Manager’s job. "Whenever you name a team… that is when you have to make the most difficult calls." Selecting who's in and who's out shapes everything that follows on the pitch.
For CEOs, it’s no different, albeit with slightly less interference from the press and pundits! Getting the right people in the right roles is the single biggest lever for growth for a business. And it’s not just about individual brilliance; it’s approaching hiring with a whole squad mentality. Here are some key lessons we’ve learned from helping management teams get the best out of their people (and we’ve loosely tied it to football as we approach the eve of the 2026 World Cup).
1. Leaders grow people; they don’t manage them
The best football managers know that their role is to set the vision, build the environment, and trust their players to deliver. The same is true of top leadership, and Naz Dossa, CEO of Peoplesafe referenced the quote from Jack Welsh, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, to bring this to life: "Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." Great football managers leave no room for doubt on their expectations – the values and standards for the team – but it’s about inspiring them rather than managing them. As Alex Ferguson stated, "My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That's the difference between leadership and management."
Often this is one of the more challenging lessons for CEOs, who might have been able to leverage manager skills to get a business to £10m EBITDA, but need to evolve those skills as it becomes a £30m+ EBITDA business. If your Board don’t feel empowered and trusted to make decisions and execute on a top-level vision rather than instructions, then it will find it hard to scale.
2. It’s a team sport, and a team trophy
No World Cup is won by an individual, and for every Mbappé golden boot highlight reel, there is a midfielder who did a lot more hard yards. It’s why managers focus on making sure every player in that squad knows their contribution mattered, not just the eleven who started the final or the striker who scored the winning goal.
It’s tempting in business too, to lionise the rainmaker in sales, or even to have a ‘what-the-founder-says-goes’ mentality. The best businesses are those where leadership recognises that brilliant team members excel at what they do best and success is celebrated across the business. This often is something that needs to be deliberately set up – if left to our own devices, we tend to celebrate the shiniest new logo wins and remember the loudest voices. We’ve seen companies deliver this through end-of-year internal awards covering not just commercial milestones but also personal goals. At Ciphr, Sion Lewis shares regular CEO Insights on Linkedin, communicating success and milestones from across the business, shining a light on what teams are doing and some of the great successes and challenges. As our keynote speaker at our ECI Unlocked Performance Summit highlighted: “Messages take a long time to land, so if you think you’re over-communicating, you’re probably at about the right level.” Doing this well boosts engagement, which leads to better collective results.
3. A great individual can still throw off a great team
For every story of a talisman taking their country to glory, there’s a cautionary tale of a world-class talent disrupting the dressing room. Think back to France in 2010, when an argument between striker Nicolas Anelka and manager Raymond Domenech led to his expulsion, and the whole team boycotting a training session in protest. Or a player who is phenomenal on the pitch but rubs players up the wrong way off them (Maradona might not be who you want around your Boardroom table). The conductor Phil Meadows touches on this when he talks about the conditions great teams need to perform, which translates across music, football and business: "When working with virtuoso musicians (or highly skilled teams), risk is accompanied by vulnerability. People open themselves up to criticism, putting their insecurities on display to develop their skill sets or contribute something new… People who feel secure in their risk-taking, are more likely to contribute groundbreaking ideas." A single star who makes the rest of the orchestra feel they can't speak up shuts that environment down, and the music suffers for it.
This can be one of the least discussed challenges of scaling a team. A brilliant hire who doesn’t fit well with the broader dynamic. At ECI, we look at psychometrics alongside hiring roles, as it’s not just what an individual can do, but how they will work alongside the team. In the book Mastering Uncertainty, Matt Watkinson and Csaba Konkoly highlight that CEOs need to be cognisant of this. "Surround yourself with people who have different skills and behaviours to you, rather than those who will support or replicate your own outlook." The right question to ask of any standout candidate isn't just "are they brilliant?" but "will they make everyone around them better?”
4. Build the pipeline
It isn’t just about who is in front of you today; top-performing teams think years ahead about their academy pipeline. Football Managers are all too aware of this dynamic, spotting and backing talent early, with the likes of Jude Bellingham progressing through the England age-group ranks from under-15 level upwards before stepping into the senior squad as a teenager.
Now, we’re not expecting CEOs to attend graduate fairs any more than Thomas Tuchel is going to go to your five-a-side game, but strong People functions in businesses should have good visibility of the high performers in their business with potential to progress into C-Suite roles. As Tamsin Webster, Head of People at ECI, comments, modern HR is about "unlocking human potential and creating a high-performance culture," and a critical part of that is using data on engagement, performance and retention to spot who's ready for the next step. Otherwise, a vacancy ends up forcing the question, and teams aren’t able to absorb the loss of a key hire without losing momentum. If you have credible next-generation talent, you have people stepping up who already have a solid understanding of your company, its culture and processes. Having a view of the roadmap also creates a better understanding of gaps and where teams need to invest.
Insights
11/06/2026
Chris Watt
Read Time: Min
Picking the right team
Neal Griffith, ECI's CFO, discusses his unconventional route into private equity - from law degree to interning at a bank at the start of the global financial crisis - and how he’s learnt to not catastrophise.
Q: You studied law, worked at a bank and then moved into private equity. What has driven your career decisions?
Over the years I have been asked a lot why I read law to then not pursue it as a career. The answer is that I didn’t have a concrete plan at 18 years old to be a lawyer, but rather considered that the degree sounded like a good one that would provide career optionality. I hoped it would teach me valuable skills around how to think critically, write succinctly and articulate thoughts clearly. I’m certainly not perfect at all of these things but I do think the degree helped! I frequently use those skills now in many aspects of my role.
Having graduated from a good university I had to think about what was next. I had done the usual law vacation scheme placements during my time at university but wasn’t sold on it nor had I received any lucrative training contract offers! Added to this was the fact that it was 2007 and the murmurings of a growing and global financial crisis were getting louder. After a bit of soul-searching I decided to take up the offer of a 12-month graduate internship in New York with the private banking arm of Citigroup. I suppose it was during this period that I realised the financial world did really suit me. The end of my year coincided with the demise of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, though, and it was then clear that we really were in the midst of a proper crisis.
Given I had all but settled on staying within the financial sector in some guise I set about trying to get a job within banking back in the UK. I dare not admit the number of times I was met with the phrase ‘we’re firing, not hiring’. A bit of sage advice from family members about the sense in getting a professional qualification eventually landed and I started my chartered accountancy qualification with Grant Thornton in Belfast in 2009.
So, a slightly more circuitous route than some of my peers but one that I now look back on with a great deal of fondness and appreciation for the lessons learned during one of the more volatile periods in recent history.
Q: And how did you end up in private equity specifically?
Complete luck, really. A colleague in Belfast who was training alongside me at Grant Thornton passed on a message from a recruiter about an entry-level finance role at a private equity house called Vision Capital in London. He wasn't interested but knew I had been talking about moving to London so shared my details. I got the job!
At that point I knew very little about private equity, I was just looking for the next step after audit and wanted to move to London. It ticked all the boxes and everything developed from there.
Q: What made you want to join ECI, and has it been as you expected?
A few things stood out. The culture felt distinctive, the track record and the long-established nature mattered. There is a lot of embedded experience here, and the functions and processes are well-established and tested. I also knew I’d have a proper handover with Philip, my predecessor, which I felt was a significant, and rare, benefit.
I realise it may sound a bit trite, but what I was sold during the interview process has materialised. I suppose one piece that we perhaps had not fully anticipated is the extent to which I would be wearing an AI hat within the firm. Well, two hats – the hat of someone who wants ECI to innovate and grow, and a compliance hat that is responsible for governance and data security. It’s a genuine stretch, but a really enjoyable one, the kind of stretch that ends up being one of the more interesting parts of the job.
Q: What do you think are the key attributes for someone looking to be a CFO in this sort of industry?
Comfort with complexity is essential. There are a lot of grey zones and you need to be at ease with that. Resilience matters too – things don’t go to plan more often than most CFOs would care to admit. And more than anything else, a good team. You can't do this job alone. We have strong internal teams, good advisors and good administrators, all of whom are essential.
I don’t think there’s a particular route in to the role and I view my own as having certain benefits. It forced me not to give up, but it also meant I built a broader set of skills than I might have done through a different path.
Finally, be prepared for the downs as well as the ups – this is a long-term industry and the best people within it tend to have that long-term perspective.
Quick Fire with Neal:
What was your first ever job
Caddying at Royal Portrush Golf Club. It was a great job for learning to talk to people from all walks of life. I was 17, and I kept doing it through my university holidays. In hindsight it was excellent training for a career that turned out to be quite relationship-driven. It’s for others to judge whether I was actually any good at the caddying part!
Beach holiday or city break?
City break is my default, but these days, with children, beach holiday wins.
What's your best and worst use of AI so far?
The best is probably when we used it to dig quite deeply into a pretty specific legal point, which surfaced some nuanced alternative thinking that allowed us to discuss with the lawyers and ultimately achieve a better outcome. The worst was when we were repeatedly trying to get Copilot to scrape a file and it kept returning the wrong one. There’s something uniquely frustrating about it saying, ‘You’re right, my mistake, here is the correct file’ and returning, yet again, the wrong one.
What's the best piece of advice you've received?
It came from my dad, after I got some exam results that weren't what I had hoped for. He said: “It's not what you wanted, but just remember you're the same person today that you were yesterday and will be tomorrow. You'll get past it”. I'd always been fairly good at things up to that point, so it was the first time something had gone off-plan. I was catastrophising well beyond what was warranted. That advice – or really, that perspective – has stuck with me. Things still go off plan, and I'm still not perfect at dealing with that, but I'm better than I was.
What would your colleagues be surprised to learn about you?
That I do actually have a sense of fun! I think when you join a well-established organisation in a role like mine you probably lean with your more serious side. I hope that they have seen I do have a more fun side as well!
Insights
08/06/2026
Read Time: Min
“Quick Fire” with Neal Griffith
TOPICS:
Neal Griffith
When we last wrote about the importance of DPI in 2022, we stated that this was becoming the most important metric for LPs assessing Fund performance. That importance has accelerated, with McKinsey's 2025 Global Private Markets Report finding that 2.5x as many investors ranked DPI as their "most critical" performance metric compared to just three years prior. Jeremy Lytle breaks down why it’s so important in the current market:
The widening gap between TVPI and DPI
Distribution to Paid-In Capital (DPI) is one of the clearest measures of a private equity fund's actual performance. It is the ratio of capital a fund has returned to its investors against the total capital called i.e. once DPI passes 1.0x, every pound put in has been paid back. It is often discussed alongside Total Value to Paid-In Capital (TVPI), which takes into account the value of unrealised holdings. The distinction is important as TVPI reflects what a manager believes their portfolio is worth; DPI reflects what they have actually delivered. The wider the gap between those two figures, the greater the problem for LPs who have value on paper but none of the certainty of it being delivered.
The latest UK Private Capital Performance Measurement Survey shows the gap between TVPI and DPI is accelerating. This means LPs are holding more risk in undelivered valuations.
The cause for that gap is broadly Covid vintage funds. Significant capital was deployed at peak valuations, and many of those assets are now marked at book values that the exit market is unlikely to validate. GPs who deployed aggressively in that period are, in effect, stuck, as they are unwilling to crystallise losses by selling, but unable to demonstrate realised returns by holding. This is a significant issue in the market, albeit ECI’s focus on vintage diversification and deploying funds over a 4 year period means only 6% of the unrealised portfolio is from that peak 2021 period (one investment, Avantia, which is delivering 22% revenue growth and 42% EBITDA growth).
The exit market has not yet rejuvenated
Despite expectations that 2026 would see an uptick in exit activity, it looks set to be another year of many investors pushing out realisations. For many exits, that is due to valuations still not being strong enough, as referenced above. For IPOs, geopolitical instability and the more cautious mood music on software valuations mean that planned listings are being deferred, creating a dampening effect on the large-cap market. For larger-cap Funds, or those holding a few outperforming larger assets, it is this lack of exit routes that is having such a knock-on effect on DPI.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t deals to do. Processes that would once have been competitive auctions are increasingly pivoting towards more discrete bilateral conversations, as selling funds are wary of tarnishing assets through failed sales processes in this unpredictable environment. Five of ECI’s ten investments in ECI 12 have been off-market, creating opportunities to spend more time with Founders and management ahead of an investment and ensure deep alignment.
Synthetic DPI is not the answer
Faced with this pressure, some GPs have turned to fund-level NAV facilities - borrowing against the fund to distribute cash to LPs without selling assets. This solves a short-term problem, but LPs don’t always view this favourably, as it comes with a cost and doesn’t actually deliver on the realisation of an asset. Distributions funded by leverage rather than actual realisations can be viewed as kicking the can down the road.
Continuation vehicles sit in a more nuanced place. Where CVs are used highly selectively, for premium assets and where management and investors are aligned, LPs generally are on board. But the credibility of that can be diluted if it happens too often. It gets harder to state that this asset is a ‘once in a decade’ opportunity if you said the same thing about a different business only the year before.
What is the impact on the market?
The hunt for DPI is reshaping the industry in three ways. The first is fundraising. Firms unable to sell assets except at a discount are caught in a bind: hold, and their DPI stays too low to raise a new fund; sell, and their realised performance might be too weak. Many funds are pausing their plans, and the effect compounds, as slower DPI makes LPs more capital-constrained.
The second impact of the hunt for DPI is on potential value creation. Because Funds can’t exit, their teams are stretched more thinly across multiple assets. At ECI, we’ve always believed that a focused single strategy, a disciplined deployment pace and a structured portfolio monitoring process are the foundations of a consistent DPI.
ECI has a relatively small portfolio of 15 unrealised companies, compared to a team of 52 people, which means we can be more focused on managing risk and value creation opportunities. Our recent funds reflect that approach. Our 2015 vintage stands at 2.5x DPI, and our 2018 vintage has already passed 1.1x, materially ahead of relevant market benchmarks.
A third impact is that there has been more of an interest from investors in the mid-market, because of the range of multiple exit routes, including larger financial sponsors, strategic trade exits and less commonly CVs or IPO exit routes.
For the private equity industry to continue to thrive, exit activity and the recycling of capital is of paramount importance. Current market dynamics suggest the gap is likely to continue to widen this calendar year before we see a return to strong DPI performance across the market.
If you'd like to discuss DPI or any of the themes raised here, please get in touch.
Insights
28/05/2026
Jeremy Lytle
Read Time: Min
The accelerating DPI gap and why it matters
TOPICS:
Jeremy Lytle
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