Leading investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) has accepted a £5.4bn takeover by private equity consortium Harp Bidco. This consortium is led by CVC Capital Partners, with other main buyers including Nordic Capital and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority-owned Platinum Ivy.
Under the terms of the deal, the consortium will pay £11.40 per share, including a 30p final dividend. Shareholders can either accept the cash offer in full or exchange some of their shares for stocks in Topco, a leading American food company.
Both Peter Hargreaves and Stephen Lansdown, who collectively hold more than 25% of the companies’ shares have accepted the offer, and the board is “unanimously recommending” that shareholders do the same. This will result in a major payout of £535m and £308m for Hargreaves and Lansdown respectively.
This comes after months of negotiations, in which HL refused several lower offers from the CVC-led consortium since April and had pushed back the deadline for the deal multiple times.
With the deal now expected to go ahead in the first quarter of 2025, HL has released its final year results, with a total revenue for the year of £764.9m, up by £30m since 2023.
The firm currently holds more than £155bn in assets under management and has around 1,900,000 active clients.
Consequently, this acquisition marks the latest blow to the FTSE 100, as the investment giant joins firms such as Flutter, which have already left the index this year.
Alison Platt, chair of HL said, while the board was pleased by the current progress of the company, the offer by the consortium represented “an attractive opportunity for HL shareholders to realise an immediate and certain cash value for their investment”.
“We are pleased to see that the consortium is aligned that HL has an important purpose making it easy for the UK consumer to save and invest for a better future,” Platt concluded.