Aim's willingness to provide a home for overseas companies is cited as one reason for its survival, but is also why it regularly attracts criticism. The junior market's lighter touch regulation is good for growing businesses keen to reduce the cost of an equity market listing, but it's also good for the occasional manager who doesn't want to play by the rules. That's not behaviour exclusive to international managers, but the market's recent flirtation with Chinese companies offers a case in point.
Some, such as Robin Boyle of Athelney Trust, an investor in Aim shares and one of its original constituents, told us that many such companies should never have made it to market, highlighting an inherent conflict of interest in the market's regulatory structure. At present regulatory duties are shared by Nomads and the London Stock Exchange itself - both, of course, benefit in the short term by increasing the number of listings, and while Aim's Chinese walls may be more robust than Aim's Chinese constituents the arrangement nevertheless casts a shadow of doubt over how the market is run.
Scandal, of course, always attracts a disproportionate amount of attention, and most companies on Aim and their advisors manage to avoid it, one reason why we're not as dismissive as others, accepting that sometimes regulatory trade-offs need to be made to give smaller companies the access to capital they need if they are to become the big companies of tomorrow. Looking even further down the scale we're also pleased at the emergence of crowdfunding as a way for even smaller businesses to get on that road to growth - it has genuinely democratised the process of starting a business.
Yet if Aim is loosely regulated, crowdfunding is even less so. And whatever the good intentions of the companies raising money or the platforms facilitating this, their enthusiasm won't always translate into success. Sometimes that will be because their ideas are simply not commercially viable. Sometimes it will be because they've not put systems and processes in place they need to capitalise on a good idea - something larger listed companies occasionally fall foul of, too.
It's a totally avoidable failure that a bit of advice early in a company's lifecycle can prevent. One company that specialises in helping the UK's innovative through this difficult startup phase is accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, and we'll be working with them over the next few months to identify some of the UK's most exciting young tech businesses. The best of these will receive invaluable advice from Blick Rothenberg for a year, guidance which could make them one of the Aim stars of the next two decades.
