Gathr: Senior PE Professionals Educational Dinner
Senior PE Professionals Educational Dinner
Michelin-Starred Private Dining Room (this event is free to attend. All costs are covered by Gathr).
Join us for an intimate evening of thoughtful discussion, shared insights, and exceptional food with fellow private equity leaders.
Topic
✨ Cloud Rate Optimisation, the hidden value creation lever? - A look at how smart commitment management can easily save PE backed companies £1,000,000s.
Featuring a real-world case study from Form3, a PE-backed FinTech valued at £436m.
Why This Matters
PortCos face a hidden margin killer: cloud costs that spiral as they scale. Engineering teams lack the time and specialist expertise to optimally manage cloud commitments, which function like commodity hedges requiring forward-buying decisions that lock in financial obligations, giving up flexibility. The result? Millions in preventable, surprise cloud spend that erodes EBITDA and valuation.
The Answer
Cloud commitments are financial instruments, not IT decisions.
You wouldn't ask your CTO to trade oil futures & options. Cloud rate optimisation requires similarly specialist expertise & tooling to forecast usage and to maximise cost-saving commitments while retaining technical flexibility.
For PE firms, building this advanced capability in each PortCo is inefficient. A turnkey FinOps partner delivers deeper savings at higher velocity across your portfolio while keeping engineering teams focused on product differentiation.
Real-world Case Study from
Steve Cook - Co-founder & Strategic Advisor, Form3
Steve is a technology leader with over 30 years’ experience in financial services. He has led engineering teams across global banks and FinTech startups, with 15 years spent working in Asia. He holds a degree in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge and is the founding CTO of Form3.
Form3 is a London-based, PE-backed fintech valued at ~$570m (£436m) providing cloud-native Payments-as-a-Service to banks and fintechs. As transaction volumes scaled, cloud costs rose rapidly, making margin discipline critical. For PE firms, Form3 is a high-growth, mission-critical infrastructure platform enabling real-time payments and banking modernisation.
In this session
We'll explore how PE firms can leverage rate optimisation FinOps to:
Secure immediate EBITDA lift
Drive deeper savings at scale
Eliminate engineering drag
Standardise portfolio-wide efficiency
🤝 Supported By
This dinner is kindly supported by our partner:
Strategic Blue helps customers pay less for AWS with no engineering effort and no lock in to specific services or spend level. It uses AWS Reserved Instances and Saving Plan commitments in a way that provides access to discounted rates without the need to make large long-term commitments. A broader FinOps service wrap includes a dedicated AWS FinOps Manager to make additional cost-savings recommendations. (Privacy Policy)
Dinner Schedule:
19:00–19:30 – Arrival & drinks reception
19:35 – Seating & introductions
19:40–20:30 – Topic kick-off & discussion
Engage with the topic over a multi-course fine dining experience
Guests will swap seats once between courses to meet more peers
20:30–21:00 – Peer-to-peer chat
21:00–21:30 – One last drink or head home
P.S. If you or anyone in your portfolio is searching for a great service provider—from PR and accounting to recruitment or anything in between—we’re here to help. We’ve vetted and curated top partners in one place at Gathr.