Simon Walls

This is about the medium term, the long term rather than the short term.

And I'm not sure that the societal appetite is yet established.

I think we've made great strides, but we need to be on this path for three, four, five years for people to say, okay, the UK has really got it.

And I'd apply that across a whole range of the reforms we're doing.

Each of them have downsides.

These aren't always low-hanging fruit, but we try and get that out clear and try and get it into society so that when the downsides happen, we can hold our nerve and keep going forward.

So you gave me an opportunity.

There are actually three things we announced today.

I didn't think I'd get the third one across, but this is a public offer platform where we're saying, if you're a private company and you want to raise more than £5 million as a one-off, here's a structure.

And actually that structure seeks to address the point you're raising, which is putting a little bit more due diligence in to protect retail in those investments.

We have Pisces coming down the track, a new type of trading venue again for private companies, a sort of bridge between the private markets and the public markets.

Your broader question,

There are no easy answers on these things.

So I think private markets as an asset class, it's been booming and many good returns available.

But the absolute heart of it is reduced liquidity.

That's almost the thing about private markets is they're not public and they...

and the valuations are less frequent and in many ways harder.

So I'm not averse in any means by measures to get that into retail portfolios, but you can't pretend that it's liquid.

So I'm sceptical about people use the term democratisation.

It does raise my eyebrows sometimes because private markets need to retain the features of private markets.