Shahbaz Qasim is rolling the pitch at Arrowpoint
Profile on the Manchester based managing director of Rothschild's mid-market team
Hello Rainmakers,
Shahbaz Qasim used to open the batting for the cricket clubs he played for, and captained. But with age comes experience, and as he’s slipped down the batting order to play a slightly different role now, in his work mode, you also get the impression he’s brought that broad understanding of team work to doing deals too.
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When Shahbaz Qasim joined Arrowpoint, Rothschild’s mid-market corporate finance team, as a managing director last year, he started building his innings there by completing a buyside deal for LDC, but he says what he’s really focusing on is what he calls “integrating our expertise” – work he hopes will see him convert some of the five sell-side mandates he’s currently working on.
From Manchester Grammar School to the University of Liverpool, Shahbaz’s early story is a familiar northern professional tale with a twist. Coming from a Pakistani heritage family, he says the expectation was he would go into medicine. He studied physiology and “was supposed to be a doctor”, but, as he puts it, “I just always had a real flair for business,” so he switched tracks and joined PwC’s audit team in Manchester in 2013, as they supported him through his ACA qualification.
Audit was the necessary apprenticeship rather than the destination: “I realised I was never going to be an auditor. I’m sure you’ve heard that story before.”
Instead of waiting for an internal move, he walked his CV down the road. A local recruiter introduced him to Clearwater’s Mike Reeves. After a characteristically brisk Manchester meeting – Iron Man Reeves arriving straight from a swim in the Salford Quays– Qasim was offered an associate role and, in December 2016, began what he calls “the start of my career in corporate finance”.
At Clearwater he cut his teeth on a string of mid-market deals: working with Paul Jones on the sale of Imtec to EDF Energy, and the sale in 2018 of BCN Group to Beech Tree Private Equity.
Clearwater’s European expansion then gave him his first break abroad. In 2019 he spent six months in Copenhagen with the Danish team and managed to complete two deals in that time – one in hosting and technology, another in secondary packaging – “which is quite rare” on that timescale.
By 2021, with COVID having accelerated the digitisation of everything, Qasim could see where the deal flow was heading. PwC – by then moving from a regional to a sector-led M&A model – came calling with a national tech mandate. He joined in the summer of 2021 to focus on technology M&A, particularly software and B2B data.
It proved to be a fertile run. “I got six deals done in three years in tech,” he recalls.
The tombstones from that period include the BCN Group sale (a business he’s now sold twice), FSP (a digital transformation consultancy), and Sedex, a supply chain data platform, sold to LDC.
That Sedex deal has already had a lucrative sequel. “The deal we did in 2023 was about £100m,” he says. “They sold it for north of a billion a few weeks ago… The reason was a proprietary data platform and a really good management team.” For Qasim, it’s a textbook example of what still attracts capital in an AI-scrutinised world: mission-critical software, defensible data, and founders who understand both technology and innovation.
