“If I have two wishes for this year it would be to win a Grade 1 race and then the holy grail, try and get a winner at Cheltenham. If we achieved those things this year, I’d be very happy. We’re only at the start of it.”

Noel Moran, The Irish Field, September 2020

WHEN Noel and Valerie Moran first set up their company Prepaid Financial Solutions (PFS) around their kitchen table in London, it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. The company was an alternative banking business trying to make ground during the worldwide financial meltdown of 2007-8.

The business lost €42,000 in its first year and there were more bumps along the road and plenty of uncertainty in the early stages. That required a resolve that would serve the Morans well for the future and, after the business secured a key client, it turned out to be the break they needed. They haven’t looked back since.

Their journey has to be one of the great Irish, and Zimbabwean (Valerie’s home country), business stories of the last two decades. Noel, as CEO of the company, was named European Entrepreneur of the year in 2018 and just last year the pair sold the business, netting a profit of well over €200 million.

“It was a very demanding business,” Valerie Moran explains. “The hours were so long, we didn’t get much sleep at all and it was seven days a week. If the job needed to be done, we’d be working until two or three o’clock in the morning.

“At some point you realise, you’ve taken the business to a certain level and maybe it’s the right time for someone else to come in and take it to the next level. We were happy with our achievements and what we had done – we got numerous recognitions within our industry over the years.

“When it came to selling the business, it came at the right time because we had many other projects as well. This business here at Bective is a massive business as well because we have the horses here now and we’re trying to build a hotel as well.”

The couple have another company (Ecomm Merchant Solutions), but now in the last five years have invested into their favourite leisure activity, National Hunt racing. The massive business Valerie refers to is a 180-acre site in Bective, Co Meath, the couple bought five years ago and one in which they have invested significantly. There are almost 50 stables built, a three-furlong perfect circle gallop, a walker, a 60x40m arena, a lunge ring, eight winter sand paddocks (with plans for five more) and 10 new grass paddocks (with plans for another five also).

“We’ve bought plenty of horses that are proven on the track but I always would have liked the opportunity to breed,” Noel explained. “Not that I know a whole about the breeding end of it, to be honest, but to have the opportunity to have a place where you could breed them. That is probably really how Bective Stud started off.

“We want to buy proven racehorses but we also want to be able to breed our own horses and in three, four or five years’ time have them coming along every year after that.

“We have Michael Lynam here who runs the stud farm for us. He comes from a very good background and he is local. Michael knows the industry very well and he knows the breeding end of it very well. We normally do the pre-training here as well.

“There was about 40-odd horses here for three months or so during the summer. They do about six or seven weeks here with us before they go back to Gordon’s so it means they can hit the ground running.”

Desire

Such a desire to breed and, in doing so, invest themselves emotionally in jumps racing, was illustrated further by their purchase of Apple’s Jade for €530,000, a record price for a National Hunt broodmare at Goffs in December.

After making that purchase, Noel said: “It will be very, very unlikely that we will see her like again and it’s next to impossible to have a chance at auction to buy a mare like her. We are delighted to have gotten her and I’d say in future we will definitely be keeping her progeny to race.”

The couple’s business experience has prepared them well for the rollercoaster ride of owning National Hunt race horses, and such an experience has been key because patience and resolve have been required already.

Their first horse with Gordon Elliott, Moonman, was a promising Dromahane point-to-point winner, but broke down on just his third start. Elliott said that if they were still interested, he had a couple of other horses for them. They were and one of those horses was Swingbridge who won six in the now more familiar white and green colours.

Yet, prior to last season, the couple still only had three wins in Ireland. That changed last year when they recorded four winners in Ireland and went to Cheltenham with two live chances – The Bosses Oscar and Queens Brook – who both acquitted themselves well.

This season, the Morans’ patience and investment into their project has drawn the much desired tangible success. At the time of writing, the couple have 16 winners on the board.

Zanahiyr leads the way in terms of excitement. Second favourite to the well-regarded Willie Mullins-trained Saint Sam in the Grade 3 juvenile hurdle at Fairyhouse’s Winter Festival, this son of Nathaniel quickened away from that rival in the style of a top-class racehorse, winning by 14 lengths but more significantly he stopped the clock at a seriously impressive 4m 2.10s. That was over 10 seconds faster than the time Ballyadam recorded in the Grade 1 Royal Bond a half an hour later.

Zanahiyr supplemented that performance with a Grade 2 win at Leopardstown on St Stephen’s Day, scooting away from a deeper-quality field, prompting bookmakers to slash his price again for the Triumph Hurdle.

Impact

Grand Roi was another to make an impact at Christmas. The £400,000 Doncaster Spring Sale purchase, formerly trained by Nicky Henderson, took a Grade 3 at Limerick in impressive style and has plenty of Festival options.

There was also another bumper win for £255,000 purchase Hollow Games at Leopardstown.

Ginto, a £470,000 purchase, finished second on his racecourse debut in a Fairyhouse bumper on January 3rd, while earlier, Party Central finished second on her first start in the white and green silks of the Morans’ local GAA club Bective, in a listed mares’ bumper at Navan before filling that position again in the Grade 2 mares’ bumper at the Dublin Racing Festival.

Earlier this year, the Morans paid £300,000 in the online Doncaster January Sale to acquire Hollymount, a Carlisle bumper winner.

All of the horses mentioned so far in this piece, a selection of the Morans’ best prospects, are aged six or younger. A telling statistic is that, out of all their runners this season, only one has been seen over fences, not because they’re adverse to that discipline, but purely because their horses are conventionally not yet old enough to embark on a chasing campaign.

This is only the start for the couple and the trajectory of their influence on the Irish jumps game is only going one way. It’s exciting times for both, especially for Noel, who confesses that he has pulled Valerie along with him, though she says she has fallen in love with the sport as well.

Noel is the local boy done good. Brought up on the Commons Road in Navan, he went to school in St Pat’s and left there at 17 to work in his father’s furniture business. He moved into the financial industry when an opportunity came up with Permanent TSB, and his old career guidance teacher Ray Mooney organised an interview for him.

He got his first experience of cards and payments when he moved to AIB, before moving to work in London for MNBA and then worked for five or six banks as a contractor, when there was plenty of work in the sector. He ultimately joined a company called Prepaid Altair but lost his job when the crash came in the mid-noughties.

He met Valerie, who had followed her sister up to London from Zimbabwe, through a networking event, and she was his first hire for PFS. Skip on over a decade later and the company is operating in 25 different countries.

Their new company – which offers payment solutions to businesses – has been growing rapidly also. In January they won The Irish Times Innovation Award. That business still occupies them, alongside plans to build a luxurious five-star hotel on their estate. They recently spent almost €10 million to buy Knockdrin Castle on 1,000 acres in Co Westmeath. There is no slowing down yet.

Ambition

It may seem like the choice of Gordon Elliott as their main trainer – they also have horses with Olly Murphy in Britain – was an obvious and simple decision but Noel says there was more to it. Elliott is another local boy done good and his fierce ambition to be champion trainer aligns with the Morans’ attitude towards their own business.

Noel explains: “Gordon is very ambitious and, in business, we were very ambitious too. We never settled for what we had right up until the end. You always have to give it 100%, whether it’s a business or a sport, you always have to be trying to achieve something better than what you have.

“Gordon is never happy with what he has, he’s always looking to improve things, even small minor little tweaks. He is determined to win the trainers’ championship and I’m sure he will someday.

“It was just his determination on top of everything else but he is obviously a top-class trainer as well. He has come up through the ranks himself as well over the last few years from when he won his first race when he was riding as a jockey, to moving into training. I think he has a similar attitude as I would have if I was training. You’re always looking to achieve and try to be the best in your sport.”

Given Noel and Valerie have emerged as big players in the jumps game at a time when one of the biggest players, Michael O’Leary’s Gigginstown House Stud, is winding down, naturally some have suggested that this transition could ultimately be something of a straight swap. But Noel isn’t thinking like that.

“In terms of numbers of horses I don’t think it matters,” he says. “I think the ultimate goal is to build up something sustainable year on year. If you look at what Gigginstown have achieved over the last number of years, they put a huge amount of money into the sport but they have got their returns in terms of huge numbers of Grade 1 winners, Cheltenham winners and huge returns from Tiger Roll getting lucky enough to win Grand Nationals.

“I think the ultimate goal is to build up something sustainable over 10 or 12 or 14 years and not just something that is a once-off. I think it’s about trying to build it up constantly and getting to a place where you can hopefully have multiple Grade 1 winners and hopefully have multiple Cheltenham winners over a period of time. So we’re looking to build something that is sustainable but it takes time to do that.”

Valerie concludes: “When you do something, you must aim as high as you can. That motivates you to get there. There is no point plodding along. Aiming high also builds up the excitement.

“It’s very good to dream.”

The Morans could realise another part of that dream at Cheltenham next month. ?