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Genstar Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco, has acquired Evolution Benefits, a provider of benefit card payment services for healthcare and employee benefits accounts.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Evolution Benefits serves approximately 3.5 million people throughout the US. The company’s patented technology allows consumers to access their funds in flexible spending accounts, health reimbursement accounts, health spending accounts and qualified transportation accounts through special purpose prepaid Visa or MasterCard cards.
Genstar is a middle market private equity firm that focuses on investments in selected segments of the healthcare, financial services, software and industrial technology industries.
Evolution
The Sterling Group, a Houston-based private equity investment firm, has completed the acquisition of B&G Crane Services.
The acquisition was financed with equity primarily from Sterling Group Partners II and debt financing from Wells Fargo Capital Finance, BNP Paribas, Capital One Leveraged Finance and Whitney Bank.
Headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana, B&G specialises in providing fully operated and maintained crane services, heavy rigging and specialty hauling services in the Louisiana Gulf Coast region. The company has a fleet of over 100 cranes ranging from six to 825 tons in capacity and a truck fleet of over 50 vehicles.
B&G’s primary
Law firm Eversheds has appointed partner Richard Moulton as head of private equity.
Moulton will have responsibility for leading the firm’s private equity group, overseeing a team working with clients on investments to exits.
Moulton has over 15 years’ experience in the private equity sector, and has been at Eversheds since 2003.
Moulton works with clients such as ECI Partners, Inflexion, CBPE Capital, Gresham and Baird Capital Partners Europe.
Moulton takes over the role from private equity partner Mark Spinner, who has led the group for eight years. Whilst Spinner will continue to be actively involved in the private equity
Pearson, the education and information company, is acquiring Wall Street Institute from an affiliate of the The Carlyle Group and Citi Private Equity for USD92m in cash.
Wall Street Institute provides spoken English training for adults through a proprietary learning model combining web-based content, class-based instruction and digital and printed learning materials.
Wall Street Institute currently has approximately 340 franchised learning centres in 25 territories across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Its major markets currently include France, Italy, Turkey, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan.
It also directly operates a small number of learning centres,
Vestar Capital Partners V and Health Grades, a healthcare ratings organisation, have entered into a definitive agreement for an affiliate of Vestar to acquire all of the outstanding shares of HealthGrades for USD8.20 per share.
The amount represents a premium of approximately 32 per cent over HealthGrades’ 30-day average closing stock price, and a premium of approximately 29 per cent over the closing price of HealthGrades’ common stock on 27 July 2010.
The aggregate purchase price for the equity of HealthGrades is approximately USD294m, which consists of approximately 35.9 million shares, inclusive of all shares of common stock outstanding, securities
eWise, a provider of online payments and online financial management solutions, has completed a funding round led by Balderton Capital, one of Europe’s largest technology investors.
The firm has raised USD12.1m to accelerate the US rollout of Secure Vault Payments, an online banking e-payments network; launch and support operations of an online banking e-payments network in the UK; and expand the online Personal Financial Management division in the UK, China and Asia Pacific.
Dharmash Mistry, partner at Balderton, has joined the board of eWise.
Other major investors include Atlanta-based Total Technology Ventures and Patagorang, led by Roger Allen and Stanley
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and GS Capital Partners have signed a definitive agreement to acquire HGI Holdings from The Jordan Company and members of the Harrington family.
HGI is a mail-order, direct-to-home provider of specialty medical products serving chronic disease patients.
The company offers more than 30,000 products addressing a range of rapidly growing chronic disease market segments including ostomy, diabetes, urological, enteral, incontinence and wound care.
"HGI is a market-leading distributor in the large and growing home health market and will continue to benefit from highly favourable long-term trends," says Richard J. Schnall, a Clayton, Dubilier & Rice partner.
A gradually recovering exit market helped drive shorter-term venture capital performance upward in the first quarter of 2010 while the ten-year horizon continued to decline, according to the Cambridge Associates US Venture Capital Index, the performance benchmark of the National Venture Capital Association.
Certain time horizons saw an increase in returns from the previous quarter, reflecting the opening of the IPO window and a record level of merger and acquisition activity in the quarter.
However, the improvement was not enough to bolster the ten-year returns which continue to deteriorate as the calculation for this time horizon no longer includes the
The Private Equity Council has presented evidence showing the industry outperformed public markets by an average of seven per cent and 11 per cent over three and five years.
The figures contradict claims by the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation that the industry produced disappointing average returns whilst charging high fees to investors.
Mark Spinner, partner and head of the private equity team at law firm Eversheds, says the private equity industry is an easy target for the media and other interested bodies such as trade unions because it has a reputation as an asset stripping industry that
Guernsey’s government plans to give financial institutions a window from 1 January 2011 to 1 July 2011 for moving to automatic exchange of information.
The fiscal and economic policy group carried out a public consultation earlier in the summer and yesterday chief minister Lyndon Trott told the local parliament of the planned transition to automatic exchange of information for the equivalent measures Guernsey adopts relating to the EU Savings Tax Directive.
His statement outlined the intended timing of a movement to automatic exchange of information following the consideration of the results of the consultation process.
He said: “In light of
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