Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 8 April 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Investment Commitments to SME Sector: National Treasury Management Agency

2:35 pm

Mr. Nick Ashmore:

On crowd financing, there are two flavours to this, namely, crowd financing and crowd equity investment, which while not very prevalent here is prevalent in the US through groups such as Kickstarter. On crowd financing, we have had some discussions with groups involved in this area. Subject to the size of the investment, which is the challenge for us in terms of doing something at a low level, we believe there is an opportunity in this area, in the same way as there is in the UK where the government has been able to supplement the activities of these funds and programmes. To the extent that we can identify a good risk adjusted return within the financing that we would be deploying, there is no reason we should not be able to participate.