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A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry.

Travers Smith LLP has advised Billing Finance on securing a £250m funding package from specialist investor Quilam Capital. 

Travers Smith LLP is advising the senior management team of Cushon, a workplace savings and pensions fintech business, on the sale by NatWest Group of its 85% majority stake to WTW, a global advisory and brokerage company. The agreement forms part of a wider transaction, which sees WTW acquire 100% of Cushon.

The UK Government is consulting on a proposed change to the inflation indexation measure underpinning two of its cornerstone renewable energy relief schemes: the Renewables Obligation ("RO") and the Feed-in Tariff ("FiT"). The Government ultimately hopes that changing these from the Retail Price Index ("RPI") to the Consumer Prices Index ("CPI") will deliver savings for consumers, at a time when the purported cost of Net Zero has become a heavily politicised issue. However, these changes could have a significant commercial impact on existing projects (and their financing) and also dampen investor confidence in the UK's historically stable renewable energy regulatory regime, at the exact moment that the Government needs to crowd in private capital to deliver its Clean Power by 2030 goal.

Travers Smith LLP has advised longstanding client HSBC Innovation Bank on the financing of Battery Ventures’ acquisition of Signal AI, an AI-powered global risk and reputation intelligence platform.

The FCA is consulting on improvements to the UK transaction reporting regime under UK MiFIR, inviting feedback from market participants by 20 February 2026. This consultation follows client and industry input highlighting the complexities and inefficiencies in the current reporting framework across various regulations, including UK EMIR and UK SFTR.

The European Parliament, the Council and the Commission concluded negotiations late on 8 December on the Sustainability Omnibus, the highly politicised proposal to amend the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Though the agreed text is not available at the time of writing, the Council and the Parliament issued press releases with key details.

On 4 December 2025, the European Commission published three legislative texts, known collectively as the "Market Integration Package" (MIP). The MIP legislation forms part of the EU's wider Savings and Investments Union initiative, which in turn is a product of the EU's current drive to improve competitiveness and encourage growth.

The government yesterday, 4 December 2025, published an updated draft of the legislation implementing the UK's new carried interest tax regime coming into force from 6 April next year. The key principles of the regime have not been changed – broadly, all carried interest will be taxed as trading income (with a bespoke effective rate of around 34.1% being available for so-called "qualifying carried interest") - but there have been some helpful amendments to the mechanics. 

It's been a long time since a UK Budget and especially its behind-the-scenes mechanics (leaks, briefings and uploads) caused such a row. Looking behind those headlines, there was lots in the Budget of potential value to venture capital, but with a tax raising sting in the tail which we'll come to at the end.