Offshore Islands
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Jim Carmichael’s business in the UK grew quickly, profiting from the subsidised services of Sean Kavanagh’s Irish firm, Investec. The Irish firm concentrated on developing its home market with new customers, mainly banks and insurance companies.
Among those customers was the Irish Union Bank, which had merged with the Anglo-Cooperative Bank, a group of regional banks in the North of England. Both banks had European aspirations but lacked competitive size. The new group was named the Anglo-Irish Union Bank.
The Chairman of Anglo-Irish Union was David Castlemain, who had engineered the merger and pursued the growth of the group, forging links with the French BCN, selling them a ten percent share of the new group, gaining access to their extensive European network.
Within four years Investec’s sales had grown to over I£8 million, producing a modest profit. Investec was then launched with a great publicity campaign onto the Dublin new companies stock exchange. Castlemain’s bank took a thirty percent stake in the company, seeing a strong growth potential with the development of the Internet.
The bank raised capital and encouraged the company to spread its wings. Investec had commenced the development of applications for mobile telephones and Internet services, technologies that would enable the mobile telephone to access Internet services. Further into the future it would be possible to see the correspondent at the other end of the line, watch movies and music videos in high quality colour images. A fabulous market.
At the outset the new technologies were of no great interest to the general public, who saw them more as the distant dreams of specialists. But the phenomenal growth of mobile telephone exceeded all forecasts and the Internet exploded into the domain of the general public.
Castlemain, who followed closely the markets in the USA, and take-off of the Nasdaq New Technologies stocks, decided together with Kavanagh the moment was right to float a new start-up. The shares would be traded on the Dublin Exchange and the Alternative Investment Market in London.
His ambition was to equip the Irish Union Bank with an Internet capability, to provide its customers with Internet banking, so that any one of them at any time in any place could get instantaneous access to their accounts and the bank’s services. Users could carry out transactions, from paying a restaurant bill to renting a car, or, even buying shares and transferring money from their accounts to any connected location in the world.
The stampede into the new company, baptised, Shannon Wireless Applications Protocol, otherwise known as Swap, was unforeseeable and astonishing. The frenzy followed the same New Technology Internet related phenomena in the USA, the UK and continental Europe.
The so-called New Economy was on the march and nobody but nobody wanted to miss out on the chance to make a killing on the stock market in new technology stocks.
Chapter 24
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