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00:00OK, you just mentioned your company there, Atlas Merchant Capital.
00:03For people who don't know it, just tell us a bit more about it and also what your ambitions are for the company in Saudi Arabia.
00:09Well, it's fairly straightforward and it's really there's two angles to it.
00:15The most important angle right now is we're providing an opportunity for family offices and other investors within Saudi Arabia to invest alongside Atlas Merchant Capital and other institutional investors.
00:30And our largest investors tend to be in the Gulf area and in Asia.
00:35And they're looking for seriously good opportunities to invest in the U.S. financial services industry.
00:42Tom, today we have a very, very interesting situation, which is that the regional and community banks in the United States,
00:49there are four and a half thousand of them are going through a period of consolidation and it is very strategic.
00:56It is very much supported by both the regulators and the new administrations to make the regional and community banks even stronger competitors.
01:07And it's not recognized to a lot of people, but 50 percent of the lending to small and medium sized businesses in the U.S.
01:16come from these regional and community banks, not from the big J.P. Morgan, Citibank, B of A and Wells Fargo.
01:23So there's an opportunity here for significant returns in a relatively short period of time.