The point is well made, and we agree with it. There are some good examples of scaling up—Skyscanner is the one that everyone talks about—but there are too few of them and they are in too few sectors.
What is behind that problem? One issue is that the investors with the deepest pockets are not Scotland-based—they tend to be based on the west coast of the US, around Boston, in London or Berlin. The bank can be a deep-pocketed long-term investor, and we also hope that we will crowd in other deep-pocketed long-term investors. Scottish Equity Partners, which is our pre-eminent private sector venture capital firm and was recently rated as one of the top 10 venture capital firms in the world, was instrumental in the scaling up of Skyscanner. We can play that role.
We can also give management teams confidence to go further on the journey with their company, rather than selling out at an early stage. Why does that happen more often in Scotland than it does in other parts of the world? Perhaps it is because companies feel less confident about the overall ecosystem. I keep using that word; perhaps I need to think about using something a bit more original. However, the point is that they might have concerns about the other tech companies that surround them.
The Logan report is quite good on the subject. If you look at the successes, you see that those companies have a host of other companies around them, and that all those companies give each other confidence—“They made it big, so we can make it big, too, and go all the way through to a listing on the stock market.”
It is partly about confidence, partly about long-term funding and partly about not selling the technology at the stage of spin-out from university. I was looking at The Sunday Times tech track 100. One of the leading companies in that list is in Oxford, but the technology came from the University of Dundee; the company is now based in and scaling up in Oxford. I do not know anything more about that example, but the question that I ask is why that is happening not in Scotland, but somewhere else.
As a bank, we need to ask ourselves that question. We need to ask whether it is to do with the infrastructure around scaling up, in terms of premises or skills. If that is the case, we need, as well as actually investing in scale-up companies, to look for investable opportunities in real estate and skills development that could foster scale-up. It is a real issue.