Frequently Asked Questions

IPO stands for Initial Public Offering. An IPO is the traditional process by which a company raises capital through the offering of shares to the public (institutional and retail), usually accompanied by a listing of the company's shares on a recognised stock exchange.

This is an offer by a company to sell newly issued shares to investors, both institutional and retail. The company will generally be listing on a stock exchange with the need to raise capital.

A placing, as opposed to a retail offer, is the method by which a company lists its shares on a stock exchange and raises capital by selling shares to institutional investors. These shares are not generally marketed to retail investors at the time of the issue unless the correct approvals are included in the offer documentation.

ALL IPO plc is Europe's leading on-line distribution platform for public equity offerings. The company works in partnership with investment banks and venture capital firms to distribute equity products to retail investors.

ALL IPO is not a secondary market broker but a brand-new Internet-based approach to help companies place share offerings among this new class of on-line retail investor. In this way, we provide start-up companies with a powerful new channel to distribute shares and thereby raise funds.

We are the first European specialist online company to focus on delivering IPOs to the new class of online retail investor. Until now, share offerings to retail investors have involved time-consuming and cumbersome processes, e.g. paper forms for each subscription, prepayment by cheque etc. Therefore, ALL IPO makes this process easier for the investor, as well as faster, more efficient, and often cheaper than traditional methods.

ALL IPO will use the CREST settlement system to deliver stock directly into your UK brokerage account. We will use our best endeavours to deliver your shares to your brokerage account within 48 hours of their receipt by our custodian. Alternatively you can choose to receive a share certificate (this will always be the case for unlisted shares).

In the event that stock cannot be delivered to the brokerage account you have specified you will be given the option to specify an alternative brokerage account or to be delivered a share certificate.

The ALL IPO Alert service is free of charge. All that is required is for you to submit your email address into the box provided on the front page of the web site. The newsletter is researched in London and it offers news and information on imminent IPOs, as well as venture capital transactions. In addition to this, it also links to the ALL IPO website where more detailed information is available.

If you wish to subscribe to the offers we currently list on our web site you will need to sign up for a free execution-only account. To register, you should be advised to have the following information available for the online registration process.

We will require

• Some basic personal details (your home address, date of birth etc.)
• An email address where we can contact you

By law we are required to verify identity and UK residency before allowing you to access offer documents and make investments through the ALL IPO website. We perform this check online using a company called Equifax, which will check your full name, date of birth and UK address against a number of established databases such as the electoral role. This is purely an identity and residency check, not a credit check, and should only take a few seconds to perform.

Customers can fail the online check for various reasons such as having recently changed address, or by registering with ALL IPO under an alias or shortened version or their full name. If you find that the online check cannot match your details you can still register with ALL IPO by sending in TWO original and recently-dated (within the last 3 months) official documents that confirm your name and address, such as a council tax bill and a bank statement. We will review these documents and, if they match your registration details, validate your account manually before returning your documents to you by first class post. Explanation of this process is provided during the online registration process.

Membership of the ALL IPO's execution-only service is free. There is no charge for remaining a member of the service and receiving IPO news, information, or announcements by email. ALL IPO will receive remuneration from the companies or their agents for whom ALL IPO arranges investments. The amount of such remuneration is available on request. Dependent on the level of remuneration and the costs associated with handling applications and settlement of stock, ALL IPO may levy an administration charge of £12.50 per application for investment. Where a stock is settled electronically through the CREST system but you elect to receive a paper share certificate, ALL IPO will make a Certificated Settlement Charge of £11.75 to cover our costs and the registrar fee.

Payment must be made using a debit card (e.g. Switch or Delta) linked to a UK bank account. We also accept bank transfers via the BACS or CHAPS payment system. Please note that BACS payments usually take three business days to clear, therefore when an offer is due to close we may only accept CHAPS payments which can clear on the same business day. For anti-money-laundering purposes the registered address of the debit card/bank account must match the registration details of your ALL IPO account. You cannot pay for shares using a credit card.

There is no way of predicting the subscription level of an offer, thus, there is no guarantee that when subscribing for an offer you will be allocated the number of shares applied for. The allocation strategy is set by the issuing company. ALL IPO will endeavor to supply as many applicants as possible with the requested number of shares. Customers are all treated on an equal basis.

ALL IPO is a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market, and its shares are freely tradable. The EPIC symbol for ALL IPO is ALP. For more information please see our Investor Relations page.

There is a problem with this version of Acrobat Reader that occurs when opening PDF documents in your web browser. You can still view the PDF document by saving the file to your desktop and then double clicking on it. Alternatively you can install a newer version of Adobe Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com that does not have this problem.

We do not support Internet Explorer 5 on the Macintosh. This web browser was discontinued by Microsoft in 2003 and contains defects that do not allow it to operate correctly with the high levels of security used on www.allipo.com. Microsoft will stop supporting this browser in December 2005 and a number of large financial websites have already removed it from their list of supported web browsers. We have confirmed that the "Mozilla Firefox" and "Safari" web browsers on the Macintosh will work correctly with our website.