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Castlereagh Associates
Dedicated and bespoke services help deliver goals 5 minutes with Dr Neil Quilliam, CEO at Castlereagh Associates Castlereagh Associates is a new consultancy in a crowded market. What prompted its founders to start the company at this time? Castlereagh’s founder Dr Adel Altoraifi is a former minister from Saudi Arabia. In meetings for the government, he often watched large consultancies present solutions to problems they were looking at, and he felt – on many occasions – that the offering missed the cultural context, and that the provider lacked awareness of what the government was looking for at that particular time. So, when he left government, he thought there was a space for a consultancy with one foot in the region and one foot in Europe which, drawing upon the skillset and knowledge of a diverse team, could sit between the two worlds and offer better solutions as a consultancy. Q. What is Castlereagh’s philosophy? A. Our philosophy is “small is beautiful” – we want to offer a dedicated bespoke service. Our goal
is not to serve 100 or 200 clients. We want to work with a handful of clients, to work with them very closely and help deliver their goals. It’s all about delivery of service but working in a clear bespoke space. Our philosophy is also underpinned by strong values: integrity, independence and an intense peer review process to ensure that every single piece of analysis, or any product we produce, is robust and based on fact. Q. What products and services does the company offer and how are they different from other consultancies? A. We sit in this space between Europe, North America and the Middle East. We comprise a team that is diverse in terms of background and experience. We focus on financial services, energy and infrastructure, and through that we bring together a deep network of contacts that each one of us has developed and cultivated over time, and that is a real draw for us. These aren’t ephemeral networks, these are live and active networks, which give us a real reach into the geographies
Castlereagh Associates is a MENA-focused research, analysis and advisory company, providing clients with insights into political changes and sectoral trends across energy, infrastructure and financial markets. We support our clients in their decision-making, and help them develop a more competitive and resilient business in the region and globally. Our team of analysts and advisors have decades of experience in government, policy and think tanks, journalism, oil and gas and resources industries, and financial services. 22 | ARAB-BRITISH CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
