Paul Flanagan focuses on the digital entertainment and financial services sectors at Ariadne Capital where he has worked on corporate advisory, business development, capital raising, and M&A assignments.

These assignments have included: peer to peer music distribution; social networks; mobile telephony services, content and software; video gaming; on-line gambling; VoIP; IPTV; interactive education; on-line and mobile payments; on-line trading platforms; news distribution; satellite distribution; and innovations in wholesale telecommunications.

Paul has over 20 years experience selling, marketing and managing in the high-technology, entertainment and banking industries. This experience spans large corporates through start-ups and he has worked extensively in North America and Europe with dealings in Asia and the Middle East.

Paul initially worked for I. P. Sharp Associates in Toronto, using the building blocks of international networking, mainframes, databases, and software to build and sell international solutions for the oil, banking and securities industries with partners including McGraw Hill, Citibank, and SWIFT.

Based in London in the late 1980's with Reuters, he set up and ran a European sales and marketing structure for financial services applications. Notable successes included the establishment of the Blend stock borrowing and lending system as the market standard and ramped up market penetration for the securities trading and clearing system across Europe.

In the City in the early 1990's he managed Financial Institutions sales for Citibank N.A. packaging liquidity, a global network and advanced electronic-banking information technology. Notable successes included multi-million dollar global treasury-management deals with Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. He went on to work with J.P. Morgan, successfully closing fixed-income deals with sovereigns in Russian, Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.

In 1997 he left banking to create a successful high-technology start up, Cybernetic Productions, focused on innovative uses of multi-user, computer-gaming technology. Clients included BT Openworld, Accenture, Flemings, Citibank, Morgan Stanley and other financial services and consulting organizations.

His most recent ventures apply computer-game and computer-graphics technology to education, architecture, and brand advertising.

Paul earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada and an MBA from INSEAD.

Paul Flanagan