Livingbridge has promoted Bevan Duncan (1) to partner. He had rejoined Livingbridge in 2023, after spending four years as managing director of the strategic equity division at Gresham House, and then a year as COO of financial services start-up, Mintus. Prior to that he spent 13 years in the investment team at Livingbridge. He trained as an ACA with PwC in audit, before moving into its transaction services team.

Also at Livingbridge, Elizabeth Alderson (2), Tess Andrews (3), Amy Hunter (4), Laoise McGarry (5), Ronan Sandford (6) and Tom Smith (7) have been promoted to investment director; Giles Kilbourn and Gareth Molloy have been made associate director; Callum Grier is promoted to investment manager and Alex Wong to associate. 

Alderson joined Livingbridge three years ago, moving from LEK Consulting, Andrews two years ago from McKinsey, Hunter three years ago from First Capital, McGarry two years ago from Downing Ventures, Sandford two years ago from KKR and Smith five years ago from Deloitte. Hunter trained as an ACA with RSM. McGarry trained as an accountant with PKF Littlejohn.

Meanwhile, Steve Jones has been promoted to Livingbridge head of data. And Alex Holland has joined the Manchester office as investment manager, from Clearwater International Corporate Finance.

Northern Gritstone has recruited Jess McCreadie as investment director, from Octopus Ventures, where she worked as principal specialising in health tech and B2B SaaS. Prior to Octopus, she was investment director at L&G, investing in health tech, clean tech and infrastructure scale clean energy.

Arbuthnot Commercial Asset Based Lending has recruited Will Haddow as business development director for London and the South East region, from BNP Paribas Commercial Finance, where he was associate director.

Liverpool-based fund manager River Capital has recruited Dave Furlong (1) and Ben Gregory (2) to its private equity team. Furlong has joined as an investment director from Cowgills, where he was a corporate finance partner. He was previously an investment director at Maven Capital Partners. 

Gregory has joined as an investment manager, moving from CorpAcq, a buy-and-build group based in South Manchester. He also previously worked for Maven, KPMG and GE.

Investec has expanded its industrials M&A advisory team with four new members: Penny Pan (1) moves from Goldman Sachs as an associate director; Damian Dunn (2), a former equity research analyst at Investec, moves across the firm; Kealyn Coetzee (3) comes from EY in Cape Town, where he worked in corporate finance; and Rory Duggan (4) joins following his completion of a master’s degree in finance and accounting at Imperial College London.

Investec has also brought in Alicia Forry (5) as head of ESG. She has spent seven years in the firm’s equity research team where she had been head of UK equity ESG products, leading cross-sector ESG research on UK-listed companies.

And in the Nordics, Investec has recruited Sture Stölen and Lars Carlson as partners, based in Stockholm, from Norva24 and Lawrac Partners respectively.