Thank you for downloading the Bottom Line podcast. This week, Evan Davis asks a panel of

executives in the world of finance, whether their industry is productive or parasitic.

Hello and welcome to the bottom line. With protests erupting around the world against the

financial sector at the moment, we gather three people who work in that industry today.

I'll ask them the all-important question.

Does it really create wealth?

Or just find elegant ways of distributing other people's wealth to its workers?

We'll devote the whole programme to that, in fact.

But first, let's meet the guests.

You'll have to forgive us.

The panel perhaps doesn't

represent the kinds of financial institutions that attract much of the protesters' wrath. We struggle

to get the chief executives of big investment banks on the program to answer for themselves.

But what I'd like to do, gentlemen, is to get you each to explain what your company does,

because I think to the world outside, many of the occupational demarcations in the world of finance are lost on people.

First of all, then, Ken Alisa.

I run an organisation called Restoration Partners.

We are a boutique technology merchant bank.

If I crack that code, boutique means small.

There are three partners. Technology is information technology, i.e. computing. And merchant bank

means the combination of clever, creative people, access to a powerful network of contacts,

and access to capital. And we apply those to help early stage growing, high potential IT companies

...