Claudia joins Beech Tree’s Birmingham office from Springboard Corporate Finance where she had spent the last two years advising a range of private equity and corporate transactions including the acquisition of Forest Holidays by Sykes Holiday Cottages and the sale of JW Doubleday to Ben Burgess & Co Ltd. Prior to joining Springboard, Claudia spent three years in EY’s audit department working on both private and PLC clients. Claudia has a Biochemistry degree from University of Bristol and is a Chartered Accountant.

Claudia’s appointment rounds off a fantastic year for Beech Tree, having deployed £60m across four new investments in 2023; Obsequio (fire safety & compliance business), Covertswarm (a cyber- security automated ethical hacking platform), Arc Systems (IT managed services) and Learnlight (digital language training provider) as well as completing the first close of its fourth fund (Beech Tree PE IV).

Claudia said: "It's an exciting time to join the firm as we start to deploy Fund IV. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to partner with management teams of high growth UK businesses across our core sectors of Technology, Financial Services and Tech-enabled Services. I’m really looking forward to being part of a team that has a real focus on specific sectors in this part of the market”.

Managing partner Paul Franks added: "We're delighted to welcome Claudia to the team on the back of our busiest ever year in terms of new investments. This is an exciting time for both Beech Tree and Claudia as we enter 2024 with a strong pipeline of high-quality opportunities that we are currently working on, despite the broader economic environment”.