Knutsford man makes £9m from LSE deal

A former stockbroker who set up a business in his Cheshire home to allow investors to access share prices cheaply is in line for a payout of up to £8.8m after he sold his company yesterday to the London Stock Exchange.

Daron Lee, 36, will continue to head up the business, Proquote, and it will continue to be headquartered in Knutsford.

The LSE, which is paying up to £22m for Proquote, said it hoped to expand the business dramatically within the next two to three years, by competing with the likes of Reuters, Bloomberg and Thomson Financial in offering investment banks, stockbrokers and private individuals screens with real-time share price information.

At the moment the LSE provides share prices to third parties for them to distribute via their own screens to customers. David Lester, the LSE's chief information officer, said: "We provide data for 93,000 screens around the world. The Proquote screens could replace 20,000 of those."

The LSE also hopes that by making direct contact with investors around the world it could boost the number of international participants trading in the London market.

The deal marks somewhat of a U-turn for the exchange. As a mutually-run organisation in the early 1990s its members decided to sell the ICV Topic screens which provide share prices. A spokesperson for the LSE said: "At the time we decided not to compete in that area. But now we are a commercial company."

The move also marks a turnaround in the fortunes of Proquote. The business, which Mr Lee founded in 1999, abandoned a planned flotation on the stock market last year due to the bursting of the dot.com bubble.