The APO model owes much of its success to the involvement of the Investment Bank as the gatekeeper that standalone reverse mergers never had. In a traditional reverse merger, anyone could simply buy a shell and go public whether or not they had sufficient financial performance to justify being a public company. With an APO, the investment bank would not raise capital for a company that it did not believe would be successful in the marketplace. This is why the APO has such a high success rate. The investment bank also brings research, trading and liquidity to the company’s stock after the transaction closes. Investment banks find the APO process appealing because they can receive the same fees and breakage for raising the capital as they do in an IPO in a much condensed period of time and to a significantly smaller number of investors.