Since companies seeking to list on Singapore’s alternative stock exchange board, Catalist, have been required to comply with the new Listing Manual Section B, some of Singapore’s domestic law firms have been able to use their work as sponsors of the exchange to forge better relationships with clients.
Law firm Colin Ng & Partners, one of Singapore’s top 10 domestic firms, is successfully using three partners who have been trained to provide sponsorship advice: founding partner Colin Ng, Elaine Beh, head of corporate & commercial and co-head of corporate finance, and Pradeep Kumar Singh, head of compliance and regulatory practice and deputy head of the India practice group.

As part of the pioneer group of advisory firms approved to offer continued sponsorship, Colin Ng & Partners has been involved in the process from the beginning and Singh said there was some debate about whether or not the firm should take on sponsorship work. “We were very careful about what clients we would accept. This wasn’t a natural area for us - it isn’t something that only lawyers do,” he said.
Sponsorship work undertaken for existing clients has complemented the firm’s existing capital markets practice extremely well, according to Singh. “We compete with banks, boutique firms and investment funds and to do this sort of work you need to build a very long-term relationship with your client. Even though revenue-wise our sponsorship work doesn’t bring in the most money, the relationships we develop through it give the firm repeat business and keep our clients satisfied, so they don’t go searching for another firm,” he said.

Colin Ng & Partners now hopes to train more junior lawyers to do Catalist sponsor work so that they can gain invaluable experience in the wider areas of finance and transactional capital markets work. “Sponsorship work, even for small companies, is good experience because as a sponsor you are dealing with the whole range of issues. You aren’t just dealing with the legal issues and you need to monitor share prices, trading activity and a whole lot more,” Singh said.

One of the biggest issues identified by Singh and the team at Colin Ng & Partners was the need to differentiate between work assisting the stock exchange as a regulator of the financial markets and work assisting companies as a sponsor. “[It becomes a problem] where to draw the line between being a regulator and being a sponsor but it does become clearer as we go along,” Singh said.

Singh also said that a firm that wants to be a serious player and call itself a full-service capital markets advice provider really needs to offer sponsorship.