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Where will the entrepreneur be found to build a new global independent financial research business, as investment banks and brokers continue savage cutbacks of their own departments? That is the question preoccupying David Potter, former chief executive of Guinness Mahon bank and ex-managing director of Credit Suisse First Boston.

The genial Potter’s current non-executive directorships include fallen young digital information and technology company backer, New Media Spark, which recently realised £27.8 million on a stake in the Mergermarket group, with a book value of £8 million. Arguing that full information coverage on companies should supplant audits, he envisages ‘a new Fitch or Standard & Poors’ agency on the Mergermarket model, with ‘a small central core and an army of correspondents who are not on the payroll’.

Potter’s other directorships include renewable energy idol Solar Integrated Technologies, where the board has seen the departure of an allegedly over-expansive top man and contemplates a funding to help realise its potential, and carbon credits initiator CAMCO International. Fittingly for a man whose first wife was novelist Joanna Trollope, Potter sits on the board of PLUS market newcomer Quercus Publishing, chaired by veteran publishing luminary Anthony Cheetham.

Potter combines these and other business activities with the Treasurership of King’s College, London University. He is among those outraged at the corruption charges levelled in Italy against Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell’s estranged husband, his old friend David Mills.