Wyelands Capital has made a number of strategic investments and senior appointments as part of its plans to expand as a financial services provider.

This includes a partnership with Demica and the acquisition of insurance broker Trans-World Credit Corporation, which will see Wyelands expand its capabilities in inventory finance and political risk and trade credit insurance.

Wyelands Capital is the financial services pillar of GFG Alliance, which is owned by Britain’s wealthy Gupta family, and also includes metals and industrial business Liberty House and sister energy and resources company SIMEC. It was created following the group’s acquisition of Tungsten Bank last year and its subsequent re-launch as an industry-friendly bank for SMEs under the name Wyelands Bank.

Among a range of announcements is the news that Wyelands Capital has entered into a strategic partnership with Demica, a specialist provider of working capital solutions, to provide inventory finance to global commodity producers and traders.

The partnership, which sees Wyelands acquire an equity stake in Demica, will combine Wyelands’ and GFG’s extensive trading network relationships in commodities markets with Demica’s wide range of working capital solutions delivered through its technology platform.

The objective is to address what the parties say is “a significant gap in the market for inventory-led working capital solutions to industrial and trading businesses in the UK and globally”.

Inventory finance is a new space for Demica, but according to Matt Wreford, the company’s chief executive, it is “a logical next step”, with the company already having more than US$9bn of receivables and supply chain finance outstanding on its platform today.

“Our partnership with the GFG Alliance will provide us with access to the deep domain expertise and relationships in the commodity sector necessary for success,” he says. “We look forward to helping commodity firms to access committed, low-cost capital via our technology platform.”

In other news, Wyelands has also announced the acquisition of Trans-World Credit Corporation, a broker of political risk and trade credit insurance. The acquired firm will thus become the lead broker for trade credit risk insurance for members of GFG Alliance globally and work towards creating a captive insurance programme. Its first project will be to launch a new online platform designed to streamline and accelerate the process of assessing requests for credit insurance.

Finally, as part of the expansion, Wyelands has made a number of senior appointments, including Simon Grenfell as head of financial restructuring and a non-executive director of Wyelands Bank. Grenfell joins from Natixis, where he was global head of commodities, prior to which worked with Deutsche Bank, Macquarie and Goldman Sachs.

Simon Nasta also joins Wyelands as group general counsel. He was most recently general counsel at First Bank of Nigeria, and has previously worked for Allen & Overy, RBS and Goldman Sachs.

Wyelands Capital now has a London-based team of nearly 50 professionals, says Jay Hambro, chief executive: “These are very exciting times for Wyelands and we are very quickly expanding the range and scale of our services to clients of all sizes”.

GFG’s executive chairman Sanjeev Gupta says that Trans-World and Demica are “ideal partners”.

“Our aim is to provide industry-friendly financial solutions that will plug gaps in the marketplace to enable companies to grow. There is still a significant need in the commodity and industrial sectors for competitive financing and insurance,” he says.