Numis unseats Cazenove to become leading Aim broker

Numis Corporation has unseated JP Morgan Cazenove as the stockbroker of choice for the biggest British companies on London's Alternative Investment Market.

The London investment bank founded and run by Oliver Hemsley was broker to nine companies in the Aim UK 50 at the end of last quarter, relegating Cazenove, which had seven clients, to second place, according to financial data group Hemscott. Three months earlier, Numis and Cazenove had seven and nine clients respectively.

It is the first time in the short history of the Hemscott survey that Cazenove, which merged with the UK operation of investment bank JP Morgan almost five years ago, has not topped the list.

The survey has been running for eight quarters, but Cazenove is likely to have been market leader for far longer: it had a commanding lead when the first list was published late in 2007.

Lorna Tilbian, an executive director at Numis, said the broker's success among the biggest Aim companies was not a result of a particular focus on the growth market so much as "building on the foundations" of its presence in the small-cap sector to become a leading broker across the entire UK market.

Contributing to the change, two of Cazenove's former Aim UK 50 clients, gold miner Peter Hambro and investment group LMS Capital, moved to the main market, while ASOS, online fashion retailer named Numis as a joint broker.

Cazenove said: "As the UK's number one corporate broker, we are proud to represent 23 Aim clients as part of our 276-strong corporate-broking client base."

League tables for the broader UK market are likely to show 11 of Dresdner Kleinwort's brokerships have gone to Investec, while Numis secured eight and Cazenove seven. The changes follow Dresdner's new owner Commerzbank's decision to effectively pull out of London.