Peter Wood, whose two successful insurance ventures are now both open to ordinary investors, helped open trading at the London Stock Exchange as unconditional dealings began in esure.
Priced at 290p when initial dealings began on Friday, the shares had begun trading at 307p, a rise of 5.9%. But profit-taking saw the shares slip another 3.5p to 295p yesterday.
Only five months ago Mr Wood's original venture Direct Line reached the public market in the flotation by Royal Bank of Scotland. Its shares were at 201.5p, up 6% since launch.
Esure's £1.2 billion valuation included a public offering of £604 million, making it the largest UK company fundraising on London's markets this year.
Mr Wood, esure's chairman, and its chief executive Stuart Vann joined Alexander Justham, chief executive at London Stock Exchange, in opening the market.
Mr Justham said: "London is open for business for ambitious companies and offers them an unrivalled pool of deep liquidity. The IPO market is showing encouraging signs, as more companies access equity finance."
Mr Wood added: "This is a significant milestone for the company marking the next phase of growth and development. We are immensely proud of our strong business and its smooth progress to listed status."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article