There’s an interesting deal running on the Syndicate Room platform at the moment that hints at a new set of possibilities for online equity crowdfunding. If my instincts about the implications of this deal are on the right track, the opportunities both for companies and investors could get considerably broader and more interesting over the coming year or two.

Sandal is an established electronics company with annual turnover of £3m and ambitions to expand into the “internet of things” – essentially devices that are linked together and communicate online without human input. It is looking to raise up to £500,000 via Syndicate Room from retail investors and so far the interest in this deal has mainly been because the shares on offer are eligible for inclusion in an ISA – a first for equity crowdfunding.

This is possible because Sandal is already quoted on the junior ISDX stock market, which is a recognised stock exchange under HMRC’s revised rules. Since these came into effect in summer 2013, shares quoted on junior stock exchanges such as Aim and ISDX, among others, have been eligible for ISA inclusion. This gave Syndicate Room the opportunity to run the first ISA-eligible fundraising via an equity crowdfunding platform.

That’s an eye-catching line, for sure, but I think the implications of this deal go well beyond an ISA first. Here’s why.

In effect, what this deal has demonstrated is that an established, quoted company can use an equity crowdfunding platform to run a retail share offer – or book-building exercise, in the jargon – just as readily as a private start-up can use the platform to raise early-stage risk capital. This is interesting for lots or reasons.

First, it opens up a quick and very direct way for quoted companies to raise equity funding from the retail market, without having to use traditional brokers and other intermediaries. This is likely to make the process a good deal cheaper than it would otherwise be. That in turn helps to remove one of the barriers that quoted companies tend to face in offering their shares direct to the retail market: the costs end up being prohibitive, given the relatively small sums they are likely to raise.

Fundraisings totalling up to 5m euros in any 12-month period do not require the company selling shares to publish a prospectus, a lengthy and expensive legal document that provides full information on the company and the offer for investors. So I suspect we could start to see a growing procession of companies quoted on Aim and other smaller exchanges start to raise sums below this threshold from retail investors via equity crowdfunding platforms over the next year or two, given how cost effective this route could prove.

But the possibilities do not stop there. Imagine a company looking to raise a larger sum that would require publication of a prospectus. Might it be possible to run both an institutional offer resulting in a conventional placing of shares with large investors, and alongside it a direct retail offer to the crowd? Why not? There will be technical and practical issues to overcome, for sure, but the costs of the prospectus will have been covered by the larger, institutional offer, and the retail tranche will simply represent a way to let small investors into deals that they are normally unable to take part in. This lack of access has been sore point for numerous small investors for years, and continues to irk organisations such as the Shareholder’s Society (). I think the outlines of a solution are becoming visible and that for some smaller quoted companies looking to build a retail profile and following, the opportunity will be very welcome. This clearly chimes with the sentiments of James Sore, Investment Director at SyndicateRoom: “We want to increase the ease with which investors can access new and existing investments. The introduction of the ISA-eligible investment is exciting but it’s only a small step in our strategic growth plans.”

There’s a long way to go before we start to see this become a trend – and it may never fly. But I, for one, am intrigued by the possibility that, once again, alternative finance is going to turn out to be far more complimentary to its mainstream counterparts that many people realise.

Ultimately, that will be good for companies and for investors.