Giles Thorne is a Managing Director and Head of European Internet research. Giles has 21 years of investment banking experience, with the last 17 spent in equity research. Giles re-joined Jefferies in February 2012 as part of the acquisition of Hoare Govett from RBS, where he had spent two years in the same role. Prior to joining RBS, Giles spent one year as a generalist analyst at Coronation Capital and three years in technology M&A at Jefferies. Giles started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers where he trained as a chartered accountant before moving internally into the telecoms corporate finance team. Giles has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Leeds.
The Analyst's Verdict: How Public Markets Are Repricing Classifieds in the Age of Agentic AI
For two decades, public markets have loved the classifieds playbook: network effects, pricing power, and margins most industries can only dream of. Now agentic AI is forcing investors to ask whether that playbook still holds. In this one-on-one interview, Giles Thorne — Managing Director and Head of European Internet Research at Jefferies, and one of the most followed voices at the interface of classifieds and the capital markets — sits down with Simon Baker to unpack how investors are valuing marketplace businesses today, which moats the market still believes in, and where agentic AI is rewriting the investment case. Drawing on his latest research covering portals globally, Giles will separate the genuinely repriced from the merely re-narrated — and tell us what the smart money is watching next.
