Paul Shephard appointed to head up expanding acquisition finance team in Manchester
Yorkshire Bank has appointed Paul Shephard as new regional director of specialist and acquisition finance for the North West of England.
Paul will lead a dedicated team of acquisition finance directors based from Yorkshire Bank's existing offices in Spring Gardens, Manchester, and will also be responsible for developing and transacting business in other key locations within the North West such as Liverpool, Bolton and Preston.
The news of Paul's appointment to this newly created role comes as Yorkshire Bank announces two further senior appointments to the rapidly expanding acquisition finance team. Paul Hardman and Roddy Kilpatrick are being announced as new directors for specialist and acquisition finance.
The continued growth of the specialist and acquisition finance team consolidates Yorkshire Bank's push into this sector and illustrates its desire to offer fully integrated financial solutions to both existing and prospective customers.
An accountancy graduate, Paul Shephard brings with him 14 years of experience with Yorkshire Bank, rising to the role of managing partner of Yorkshire Bank's Manchester Financial Solutions Centre (FSC) in 2005.
In this newly created role, Paul will be tasked with growing the acquisition finance team and business across Yorkshire Bank's North West network of Financial Solutions Centres. He will report to Richard Kennerley who is head of specialist and acquisition finance across both Yorkshire and sister bank Clydesdale's network of FSC's.
The new acquisition finance team will assist businesses looking for advice and funding for corporate acquisitions. The support offered to businesses will be localised. By offering a bespoke, fully intergrated, finance package to its customers, who are referred to as members, the bank aims to attract significant levels of new business at a key time in the company's development.
The new acquisition finance service also adds to the bank's current integrated business services which range from commercial lending, treasury and wealth management, as well as private and transaction banking.
Paul Shephard comments: "The Manchester and North West Corporate Finance arena is a crucial and healthy market for us, I'm delighted to announce the appointment of Paul Hardman and Roddy Kilpatrick to the team and further appointments to the team will be announced in the future."
"I believe we have in place a unique and commanding proposition and can really grow our business by increasing the range of services that we are able to offer to our membership base. Acquisition Finance is a specialist area and one that will help grow our revenues and allow us to work with businesses at key stages of their development."
Paul Hardman joins the team from Bank of Scotland in Manchester where he worked in the corporate business development team for four years. Before occupying this role he spent several years in corporate banking with Royal Bank of Scotland in Manchester.
Roddy Kilpatrick is a qualified chartered accountant and takes up his new role after moving from Yorkshire Bank's sister bank Clydesdale Bank in Glasgow, where he provided specialist financial advice on deal structuring across a variety of sectors. Prior to this he worked For BDO Stoy Hayward where he was tasked with advising private equity teams on management buy outs.
Over the last two years Yorkshire Bank has focused its activities on developing a new model of banking that is attractive to private individuals as well as corporate customers - where integrated business solutions are offered to commercial businesses, entrepreneurs and high net worth individuals via a network of innovative Yorkshire Bank FSCs.
The FSC concept offers companies the type of personal service and local decision making which has become a rarity in a sector where many providers are centralising the approvals process and servicing clients' needs through call centres. Customers - private and business are known as 'members' and they can use state of the art facilities, including conference rooms with state-of -the-art audiovisual equipment, free of charge.