The Firm
Four decades in the market. Long enough to stop being surprised by it.
Bluewater Capital structures and arranges debt for European projects, funded by professional investors worldwide. Structuring, agency, trustee and market access, run by people who have worked every cycle since the 1980s.
Experience
Yes, we were there.
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.
- Blue — the plumbing changed.
- Red — something broke.
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1985Plaza Accord
G5 prove a currency can be talked down over a weekend in a hotel.
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1986Big Bang deregulation
The shouting stopped, the screens arrived, and lunch was never the same.
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1987Black Monday
−22.6% in a day. We invented circuit breakers and a nervous tic.
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1992CME Globex launches
The pit went 24-hour. Somewhere, a body clock filed a complaint.
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1992Reuters / EBS digitise FX
The phones went quiet. The machines had started talking to each other.
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1996Retail FX arrives
Suddenly your brother-in-law was “long cable” from the spare room.
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1997Asian financial crisis
Turns out a fixed exchange rate is fixed right up until it isn’t.
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2000Dot-com bubble bursts
Revenue was briefly considered optional. The Nasdaq disagreed — by 78%.
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2001Wall Street decimalises
Farewell, sixteenths. The spread shrank to a penny, and so did the glory.
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2002Physical euro launches
A dozen currencies retired into one. EUR/USD took the throne.
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2005Algos & HFT take over
The market maker moved to a server rack in New Jersey. Microseconds now mattered.
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2008Global financial crisis
Lehman filed, credit froze, and QE moved in. It never quite left.
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2008Madoff exposed
It turns out suspiciously steady returns were, in fact, suspicious.
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2010–12Eurozone debt crisis
“Whatever it takes” — three words, several hundred billion euros.
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2015Swiss franc peg collapses
The cap they vowed to defend vanished at 9:30. Several brokers vanished by 9:31.
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2020COVID flash crash
Fastest bear market in history, immediately chased by the fastest bounce.
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2020sCrypto & DeFi integration
Settlement moved onto a blockchain. The jury, like the ledger, is still distributed.
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NowAI takes the first read
The opening pass on a credit file now runs by machine, in minutes. The newest piece of plumbing. AI finds where investor appetite sits and reads the deal; what happens next is still down to the value of the project.
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 and global, matching 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: transparent terms, impartial by design, and direct access to the people actually doing the work.
Transparent pricing
Our agency and trustee fees are quoted in writing, up front — priced for mid-market deals, with no institutional-scale assumptions built in.
Impartial by design
We apply the documents as written, with no reason to favour one party over another.
Direct access
You deal with the lead on your business line, not an account layer. The person doing the work is the one who answers.
Continuity
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.
Company structure
Bluewater is a group of specialist companies, each running its own business line:
- Structuring — Blue Water Capital Limited structures and arranges debt issued by its Luxembourg subsidiary, BWC Markets S.à r.l. Clients use the vehicles as they stand; the stack is ours, the project stays theirs.
- Agency — Blue Water Corporate Services Ltd acts as facility agent, calculation agent, programme administrator, covenant monitor and registrar on mid-market transactions.
- Trustee — Blue Water Trustees Limited holds security on behalf of noteholders and lenders, and acts on their instructions.
- Market Access — Blue Water Capital Limited uses AI to find where investor appetite worldwide fits a European project, and publishes the deal to investment professionals, working through placement agents and intermediaries rather than over their heads.
Most clients engage one of our four business lines. The other three are why they trusted us enough to engage at all.
Each line operates with deep specialist focus. Clients engage one Bluewater company for their immediate need and have access to the other three — complete deal infrastructure through a single relationship.
Combine all four for the full Bluewater turnkey solution — a new funding deal taken from origination through to funding and delivery. Faster to market, and priced for the mid-market.
Regulation
Compliance runs through every engagement, not alongside it. We apply anti-money-laundering and KYC procedures across all our work, led from inside the firm rather than outsourced.
Bluewater Capital is not FCA-authorised and does not need to be. It relies on the exclusions in the Regulated Activities Order only where an activity would otherwise be regulated, chiefly arranging its own group’s issuance. Our agency and trustee work is not a regulated activity.
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
Who you will be working with
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, a Swiss firm working 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, with experience across MLR 2017 compliance, regulatory frameworks and capital markets administration, including cross-border securitisation structures.
Michelle is Security Trustee Manager at Blue Water 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 transaction documentation for the issues Bluewater arranges.
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.
Natasha is Bluewater’s AI assistant. She schedules meetings, chases documents and keeps records current. She does not advise or make decisions. Everything she does is overseen by Henry.
More about Natasha
Natasha is an AI agent, not a person. She works alongside our team on the administrative side of each mandate: arranging calls, following up on outstanding documents and keeping records current. She will always tell you she is AI. She cannot sign documents, give views on a transaction, or act for Bluewater in any trustee or agency capacity, or give advice. If you need a person, reply to any of her emails or contact Henry directly. How we use AI