The Firm
Bluewater Capital is a specialist firm in European private credit — structuring, agency, trustee, and market access, run by people who have done it through every cycle since the 1980s.
Experience
Simon and I started in the markets in 1985. Two things have run on a loop ever since. Things break — loudly, on the news, with a date everyone remembers. And the plumbing changes — quietly, underneath, without anyone being asked to vote. We’ve watched both, the whole way down.
G5 prove a currency can be talked down over a weekend in a hotel.
The shouting stopped, the screens arrived, and lunch was never the same.
−22.6% in a day. We invented circuit breakers and a nervous tic.
The pit went 24-hour. Somewhere, a body clock filed a complaint.
The phones went quiet. The machines had started talking to each other.
Suddenly your brother-in-law was “long cable” from the spare room.
Turns out a fixed exchange rate is fixed right up until it isn’t.
Revenue was briefly considered optional. The Nasdaq disagreed — by 78%.
Farewell, sixteenths. The spread shrank to a penny, and so did the glory.
A dozen currencies retired into one. EUR/USD took the throne.
The market maker moved to a server rack in New Jersey. Microseconds now mattered.
Lehman filed, credit froze, and QE moved in. It never quite left.
It turns out suspiciously steady returns were, in fact, suspicious.
“Whatever it takes” — three words, several hundred billion euros.
The cap they vowed to defend vanished at 9:30. Several brokers vanished by 9:31.
Fastest bear market in history, immediately chased by the fastest bounce.
Settlement moved onto a blockchain. The jury, like the ledger, is still distributed.
The opening pass on a credit file runs by machine, in minutes, on data the models can ingest. The newest piece of plumbing — and the reason “being read” stopped being a metaphor.
Look at the blue, not the red. The breaks make the headlines, but the quiet story is the plumbing: in forty years the market has handed itself to the machines one piece at a time — screens, then servers, then microseconds, then a distributed ledger, now an AI reading the file before a human sees it. None of it was on the syllabus in 1985, which is precisely the point. Experience isn’t knowing what comes next — nobody does. It’s knowing that something will, and having built a firm that adapts faster than the rules it was written under. Private credit is mid-rewrite right now: capital abundant, assessment moving to the machines, access the real constraint. We’ve read enough rewrites to read this one.
How we work
Across all four business lines we work the same way: published terms, no conflicting positions, and direct access to the people actually doing the work.
Our agency and trustee fees are published, not quoted on request — priced for mid-market deals, with no institutional-scale assumptions built in.
We hold no house position and act for one side of a deal. There is no book to protect and no reason to favour one party over another.
You deal with the lead on your business line, not an account layer. The person doing the work is the one who answers.
As a corporate provider we do not retire or move on mid-deal. We accept replacement appointments and stay in place for the life of the facility.
Bluewater Capital is built around four independent business lines, each run as a specialist business, not as a side service. Structuring provides turnkey infrastructure — the vehicles, banking relationships, and plumbing clients need to design their deals without building the infrastructure from scratch. The design remains theirs; the stack is ours. Agency Services runs facility agent, payment agent, calculation agent, covenant monitoring, and registrar work on mid-market transactions with published pricing and no conflicts. Trustees holds security on behalf of lenders and acts on enforcement. Market Access maps European private credit appetite and connects borrowers with the lenders most likely to fund them, working through placement agents and intermediaries rather than over their heads.
Each line operates with deep specialist focus. The group structure means clients engage one line for their immediate need and access trusted relationships in the other three — complete deal infrastructure through a single relationship.
Compliance runs through every engagement, not alongside it. Anti-money-laundering and MLR oversight applies across all our work, led from inside the firm rather than outsourced, on a clean regulatory record built over nine years.
Trustee work is conducted through Blue Water Trustees Limited (Companies House 12780682), supervised under HMRC’s Money Laundering Regulations as a registered Trust or Company Service Provider.
Our issuing vehicle sits within the Bluewater Capital group. Because we structure, arrange, and promote our own debt issuances as principal and within the group, these activities fall within established exclusions in the UK’s regulated-activities framework.
We would rather over-explain our structure than leave it opaque. If you want the detail behind any part of it, ask — we will walk you through exactly how a transaction is held and who is responsible for what.
The team
Simon has spent 30 years originating, structuring and syndicating debt for institutions and SMEs across the UK, Europe and Asia. He has worked closely with private banks, family offices, wealth managers and independent trading boutiques, and spent nine years in Switzerland running Orion Finance, an investment adviser across debt and equity securities.
Shannon is an operations and compliance professional specialising in agency services, AML/KYC and financial crime prevention. She serves as Operations Manager at Bluewater Capital, with experience across MLR 2017 compliance, regulatory frameworks and capital markets administration, including cross-border securitisation structures.
Michelle is Security Trustee Manager at Bluewater Trustees Limited, responsible for the operational and administrative management of the firm's security trustee and trust administration work. She handles the full lifecycle of each mandate — client engagement, ongoing trust administration, noteholder communications, compliance oversight, and, where required, enforcement coordination. She came to the role from professional services, including City and regional law firms.
Henry has spent 17 years in investment banking across financial centres in the UK, Singapore, Australia and the United States, working in fintech and the distribution of execution and clearing services through electronic channels. At J.P. Morgan he built out derivatives-trading distribution on the eXtraTrade platform. At Deutsche Bank he led a team providing advisory and execution services across rates, credit, futures and options, and FX to global hedge funds.
Clare is a qualified tax adviser and a member of the Association of Taxation Technicians, and has worked at Ernst & Young and BDO LLP. In 2013 she moved into the alternative finance market, helping to launch and manage a new finance company, Little Business Loans. She joined Bluewater in 2018 as an origination specialist, focusing on the preparation of investor documentation — including investment memorandums and offering documents — to FCA guidelines.
Rashmi joined Bluewater Capital following her psychology degree, bringing a detail-oriented approach to client onboarding and KYC. As part of the operations team, she supports the firm's agency services and AML/KYC functions, assisting with client due diligence and onboarding.