The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relevant to wealth advisors and their clients.

New fintech channels have fuelled new ways of financing companies. Fasanara Capital is part of that process. In this latest example, it has operated in the Shariah-compliant space.

Fina, the embedded finance platform of Saudi B2B enablement group SILQ, has secured a $75 million Shariah-compliant facility from Fasanara Capital, a London-based global investment manager with around $6 billion in assets under management.

The facility will fund Fina's embedded working capital offering for small and medium-sized enterprises in Saudi Arabia. This will give merchants access to financing through the digital platforms they already use to buy, sell and collect payments, rather than through separate loan applications, Fasanara said in a statement this week. 

Fina sits within the wider SILQ ecosystem, formed through the merger of Saudi firm Sary and South Asia's ShopUp. In Saudi Arabia, SILQ combines commerce, payments, digital operations and working capital in a single platform aimed at merchants. The group says it has supported more than 50,000 businesses and enabled over SAR20 billion ($5.3 billion) in transaction volume to date. Fina is targeting SAR3 billion in liquidity for more than 2,000 businesses this year, following SAR1.5 billion deployed over the past 12 months.

SME financing is a policy priority under Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 programme, which aims to raise the sector's contribution to GDP. 

Fasanara, founded in 2011, provides capital to fintech lenders and technology-enabled credit platforms globally, in particular asset-based finance, receivables and data-driven private credit. It manages money on behalf of pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors. WealthBriefing interviewed the business about its mode, and wrote another article about its foray into the US market. 

William Blair Investment Management
William Blair Investment Management has launched the Global Leaders Select Strategy – a concentrated portfolio of 25 to 35 major global companies which combine quality and growth characteristics.

The strategy, which has been seeded with $225 million in a separately managed account, is benchmark-agnostic. It aims to deliver strong long-term returns for investors through conviction, concentration, and compounding, the firm said in a statement.

Chandan Khanna has been appointed as the co-portfolio manager to work alongside Hugo Scott-Gall, head of William Blair’s Global Equity Team, to manage the strategy, which combines William Blair’s established global equities capabilities with an investment approach that Khanna has applied since 2021.

The strategy’s focus on a concentrated portfolio of high-quality global companies with durable growth closely reflects the philosophy and portfolio-construction approach Khanna employed before joining William Blair. While Global Leaders Select is a newly-launched strategy, Khanna brings a five-year track record of delivering strong performance with the strategy.

Global Leaders Select is part of William Blair’s Leaders platform, a series of actively managed equity portfolios focused on high-quality companies with strong competitive advantages, pricing power, and earnings growth. This includes William Blair’s Emerging Market Leaders, International Leaders and Global Leaders strategies.