Sir Patrick Bijou
Founder and Chairman
Blackhorse International / Blackhorse Holding LLC
A structured finance chairman on why most failed deals die of unclear documentation rather than bad economics — and why he reads central bank releases instead of headlines.
Sir Patrick Bijou is the Founder and Chairman of Blackhorse International / Blackhorse Holding LLC, Westpac Trading FZE, and Blackhorse Tec Acquisition Ltd. The work sits in private placement, structured finance, and cross-border capital solutions, spanning the UK, USA, UAE, and Singapore. He does not serve retail clients; the counterparties are governments, institutions, and large private entities.
Earlier in his career he helped establish the MTN and Private Placement Desk at Lloyds. He is precise about what he will and will not disclose — declining to publish transaction figures — and equally precise about the conditions under which he declines a mandate outright.
The Companies and the Role
Please introduce your company and describe your role as Founder and Chairman.
I am the Founder and Chairman of Blackhorse International / Blackhorse Holding LLC, Westpac Trading FZE, and Blackhorse Tec Acquisition Ltd. My work sits in private placement, structured finance, and cross-border capital solutions. I oversee strategy, governance, and final decision-making. I am not involved in the day-to-day execution of every transaction, but I review structure, counterparties, risk exposure, and timing before anything proceeds. My role is to ensure clarity and stability across jurisdictions, including the UK, USA, UAE, and Singapore.
What is your core business model – in-house, third-party, or hybrid?
It is a hybrid model. Core structuring, mandate review, and client strategy stay in-house. Specialist legal, compliance, and technical reviews are handled by approved third-party professionals. This reduces overhead while maintaining control. Every deal follows a documented workflow: mandate review, due diligence, structure design, compliance check, execution pathway, and monitoring.
How do you differentiate in a crowded finance market?
We remove unnecessary complexity. Many deals fail because the structure is unclear. I focus on documentation quality, timeline discipline, and counterparty verification. At Lloyds, when I helped establish the MTN and Private Placement Desk, we increased self-led deals from 4% to 32% by improving the process. That mindset continues.
Who He Works With
What sectors do you serve?
Primarily, governments, institutions, and large private entities require structured funding. Over time, my work expanded into advisory roles linked to infrastructure, energy, and institutional capital requirements. I do not serve retail clients.
What services are most in demand?
Private placement structuring. Off-balance-sheet solutions. Debt capital markets advisory. Cross-border capital alignment. Clients approach when traditional routes are too slow or too restrictive.
Information, Trust and Measurement
How do you stay ahead when information moves quickly?
I read primary sources daily. Central bank releases. Regulatory updates. Policy changes. I also rely on direct relationships. Real information comes from people executing transactions, not headlines.
Do you have repeat clients?
Yes. Repeat work comes from reliability. We define scope early. We do not overpromise. We document decisions clearly. Trust is built through predictability.
How do you measure client satisfaction?
Completion rate. Timeline adherence. Post-transaction continuity. If a client returns with another mandate, that is measurable satisfaction.
Engagement Terms
What post-project support do you provide?
Monitoring and review. Where structures require ongoing oversight, we schedule reporting intervals. Quarterly or milestone-based reviews are common.
Describe your pricing structure.
Engagement-based. Some projects have fixed advisory fees. Others are milestone-based. Large structured transactions often include staged payments tied to documentation phases.
Typical price range?
Transaction size varies widely. I do not publish specific figures publicly. Advisory engagements can range significantly depending on complexity and jurisdiction.
Have you turned down projects?
Yes. If documentation is incomplete, funding intent is unclear, or compliance standards are weak, we decline. The minimum requirement is full transparency and verified counterparties.
Regulation, Innovation and Culture
What key challenges have you faced recently?
Regulatory tightening and increased scrutiny in cross-border capital flows. We responded by strengthening compliance frameworks and third-party verification layers.
How do you foster innovation?
By reviewing failure cases. Many improvements come from analysing what did not work. Innovation in finance is usually structural refinement, not invention.
What role does culture play?
Precision matters. Documentation discipline matters. We operate on a written process, not assumptions.
Outlook
Where do you see the companies in 5–10 years?
Focused on institutional capital alignment and structured funding advisory. Growth will be measured, not rapid.
How has your leadership evolved?
Earlier in my career, I was execution-focused. Today, I prioritise oversight and risk containment. Experience reduces impulse.
What market shifts interest you?
Alternative funding routes for infrastructure and sovereign-level capital structuring.
Advice to aspiring founders?
Master structure before scale. Most failures come from weak foundations, not weak ambition.
Key Learnings
- Structuring, mandate review and client strategy are held in-house; specialist legal, compliance and technical review go to approved third parties.
- Every deal runs a fixed documented sequence: mandate review, due diligence, structure design, compliance check, execution pathway, monitoring.
- Bijou attributes the lift in self-led deals at the Lloyds MTN and Private Placement Desk — from 4% to 32% — to process improvement rather than deal flow.
- Mandates are declined where documentation is incomplete, funding intent is unclear, or compliance standards are weak.
- Primary sources — central bank releases, regulatory updates, policy changes — are treated as the information channel; headlines are not.
- His view of innovation in finance: structural refinement derived from reviewing failure cases, not invention.
How Private Placement and Structured Finance Differ from Public Issuance
A private placement is a securities issue sold directly to a limited set of qualifying institutional or accredited investors rather than offered to the public market. The trade-off is straightforward: the issuer avoids the disclosure regime, timetable and cost of a public offering, and in exchange accepts a narrower investor pool, reduced liquidity, and terms negotiated bilaterally rather than set by the market. Medium-term note programmes sit in this space, giving an issuer a standing framework to draw down funding in tranches instead of raising a single large amount.
Structured finance describes the layer above that — arrangements where cash flows, security and risk are deliberately reorganised to make funding possible on terms a conventional loan could not reach. Off-balance-sheet structures, special purpose vehicles and tranched instruments all belong to this category. The complexity is not decorative; it exists to allocate specific risks to the parties willing to hold them.
Which is why documentation quality carries disproportionate weight here. In a public issue, standardised terms and market infrastructure absorb a great deal of ambiguity. In a privately negotiated cross-border structure, the documents are the only place the deal exists — and an unclear provision does not fail loudly at signing. It fails later, when a counterparty in a second jurisdiction reads the same clause differently and has already acted on it.