He then went on to give a bit of background to his company which makes doors for commercial and industrial premises, turns over £2m per annum and last year performed so badly with falling sales and bad debts that it was forced into Administration.

It isn’t often that I feel sorry for the banks but having been publicly slated for the poor lending that got them into a financial mess they are now being slated for not lending to companies that have demonstrated that they are also poor risks

Wageroller and Smart Flow Finance have bitten the dust although there are rumours that Wageroller has resurfaced under a new name but the only factoring company to have succumbed in the first quarter of the year has been Challenge Finance.

I started off the year by announcing that GMAC had pulled down the shutters for new business but I had a meeting with one of their regional directors yesterday who told me that they were now in full steam ahead mode and with quite an innovative range of ABL products too.

Even in a fast changing world like the one we currently live in there are some things that never change. At the end of last year I announced that the parent company of Cattles Invoice Finance were about to sell the company and that would happen “any day now”. Six months down the line the supposed sale of this factoring company is still just round the corner as the parent gets further and further into the mire with it’s negotiatons with bankers unresolved, it’s accounts delayed as the auditors won’t sign them off and the shares suspended. Still I’m sure that a Cattles insider will be contacting me shortly to let me know that the sale will be happening “any day now” as has been happening at monthly intervals throughout 2009 so far.

The other enigma is Close Invoice Finance which at one time was a market leader in terms of client satisfaction but where the stories of ill treatment from unhappy clients just seem to keep on coming. This year to add to the confusion Close have closed the operating centres in Birmingham and Manchester making a number of redundancies in the process in order to cut costs whilst at the same time employing an industry heavyweight on what must be a huge financial package to run what’s left of the Northern operation, as well as buying a small factoring operation in Northern Ireland.

My predictions for the second half of 2009 are to expect much of the same. The market will still be tough to operate with the well run independents riding out the storm without too much damage to either their reputation or bottom line but I think that the recession coupled with the tough attitude taken by the credit insurance market will start to see big problems in the top end of the invoice discounting sector with companies turning over in excess of £50m failing and possibly resulting in significant bad debt losses for the banks operating those facilities.

Time will tell.

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My comment that “I guess that with the banks’ reluctance to lend money and the general state of the economy it is only to be expected that enquiries for factoring and invoice discounting would be running at high levels in 2009” proved to be miles out and whilst Factoring Solutions did receive a record number of enquiries in January, that didn’t last long and the enquiry levels drifted downwards to it’s current very poor level.

It would seem that rather than using the banks’ reluctance to lend as a reason for turning to factoring and invoice discounting the SME sector has decided that in these uncertain times they don’t want to commit themselves to a factoring agreement with it’s associated costs if the opportunities for expansion won’t be there.

Talking to other brokers it would seem that most are fairly quiet with the exception of those owned and operated by insolvency practitioners who are busy with pre packs of existing factoring clients that have failed or other companies that need factoring to provide working capital for the restart.

The only other sector of the broking community that has done well in the first six months of the year are those that have built up strong relationships with the bank owned factors by dint of introducing companies to their own bank in return for a fat fee. Now that the banks have decided to move the goalposts they have found themselves with a large number of clients that no longer fit their new criteria and those clients who find themselves surplus to requirements have been handed over to the banks’ pet brokers to find them new homes.

Highly lucrative work if you are of that mindset but here at Factoring Solutions we run an ethical broking service where the needs of the customer are paramount.

If the ABFA stats are to be believed (and I have my doubts on that score) the figures for the next quarter will be interesting as the number of clients will have gone down again as more and more fall by the wayside.

It would seem that those factoring companies that were a little choosier in the past are the ones that are suffering least at the moment as whilst their books are still contracting the rate is much slower than average. It is the factoring companies that used to operate on the basis of “If it moves sign it up and if it doesn’t move still sign it up” that are suffering more at the moment with much larger numbers of client failures with their consequential impact on staff time as well as bad debts.

Most factoring companies are now looking much closer at new business propositions with such things as single debtor deals much more difficult to place and those with concentration problems also being studied more carefully too.

continued….

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If I were younger with fewer family committments here I would give serious thought to carving out a career for myself in Australia as they seem to be crying out for experienced personnel there and I love the lifestyle.

I wonder what happened to these 35 companies? Some may have shrunk to a stage where their turnover was less than £100m so came into a lower category but that is fairly unlikely. Some more may have ceased using their invoice discounting facilities replacing them with something else but again I think it unlikely which leaves the worrying fact that 35 companies turning over in excess of £100m each have gone bust in the first quarter of this year.

Assuming that each of those companies were turning over the bare minimum of £100m and their debts turned in the ABFA average of 59 days the total outstanding debts of these companies would be in the region of £650m and assuming an average investment of 70% there would be factors funds invested of £455m

Most of us who have been involved in the “collect out” of bust clients will know that there is often a shortfall in collections as the disputes start to crawl out of the woodwork and the clients customers go bust and there is a good likelihood that losses may be incurred in that situation.

I guess that due to the size of the facilities these will all be bank factors involved and I wonder what sort of losses will be involved when collecting out an investment of at least £455m from 35 bust clients. My guess is that some of the bank factoring companies will be sitting on potentially enormous losses at the moment

The number of clients at the end of March 2009 was down to 46,999 from 48,536 at the end of the previous quarter and whilst 2,260 new companies were welcomed to the world of factoring and invoice discounting 3,027 disappeared in the same period.  Assuming that the majority of the 3,027 went bust in one way or another it’s not surprising that insolvency practitioners are the factoring companies new best friends.

I wonder if Eric Cantona was thinking of the relationship between insolvency practitioners and factoring companies when he came out with his now legendary quote “ When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”

The headline figures were that the number of active clients at the year end were down marginally to 48,152 whilst the advances outstanding at the year end rose by nearly 8% to £17billion and I guess that the initial reaction is that the figures are typical of what one might expect in the current economic climate with increasing pressure on companies cash flow resulting in higher funding levels overall.

The two interesting statistics that caught my eye were firstly that of the 48,152 clients using factoring and invoice discounting at the end of the year 248 of them had annual turnovers in excess of £100m

Advances to clients at the year end were £17 billion but a quarter of that sum was advanced to the 0.52% of clients with sales in excess of £100m and those figures skew the averages so much as to make them meaningless.

The other statistic that intrigued me was that the largest client sector in terms of annual sales was the zero to £500,000 sector with 18,500 clients which represented 39% of the total. The number of clients was virtually static compared to the end of 2007 but the advances outstanding to them at the year end was up from £542m to £908m which was a huge 40% rise

One would think that in the ordinary course of events that should be impossible. If we asssume that the average client has an advance rate of 80% and always has done – how could the overall average jump by 40%.

One possibility is that the figures include a large number of terminated accounts whose balances have been inflated by “extra fees” but the difference between 2008 and the previous year is £360m which is a hell of a lot of fees so I sincerely hope that is not the case.

If anyone has any other theories please feel free to post them here.

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There are always people around who are just after the cheapest deal but it seems to be on the increase. On Thursday we took three such enquiries in quick succession. The first was a well established recruitment company turning over £1.7m with a very healthy balance sheet who had received a quote from RBS Invoice Finance including a minimum annual charge of £12,000 and who were so pleased that we found a funder willing to do it for half of that that when arranging a meeting for next week they asked whether they would take the agreemenst with them as they were so keen to proceed. I think that has far more to do with RBS quoting ridiculously high rates in order to pretend to the world that they were actively looking for new business whereas in reality they were ensuring that no-one would take up their offers.

The other two were a recruitment company turning over £1m who was obviously contacting every factoring company in the telephone book and will probably end up with whoever quotes the cheapest headline rates and a distributor also turning over £1m who’s quote from Lloyds TSB I managed to better but who wanted to leave it until next week when he was having a meeting with his accountant which is probably a euphemism for scouring the market place.

Luckily Thursday wasn’t all about rates as we also had an enquiry from a loss making company turning over £6m who were about to sign an invoice discounting agreement with one of the independents but didn’t want to sign a personal guarantee as they thought that having been established for 30 years with 800 customers and being limited to only a 50% advance that a PG was a bit too belt and braces.

Luckily at least one factoring company on our panel agreed with them and came up with an in principle offer with a higher funding level and no guarantees.

Just to round off a busy day the scaffolding hire company turning over £500,000 with applications for payment was fairly easy to place.

It’s just a shame that more people don’t take more notice of the operating differences between different invoice financiers as they could be so keen to get the lowest rate that they end up paying a higher cost – after all £700 for an audit visit mounts up if they visit several times a year

Judging by recent activity it would seem that rather than tell the world that their factoring and invoice discounting divisions are not interested in new business they are continuing to quote but at such uncompetitive rates that no-one in their right minds would take up their offer.

Just this morning we had an enquiry from a well established firm of recruitment consultants turning over £1.7m and with a healthy balance sheet who were looking at invoice finance not because they desperately needed the money but to be prepared for the inevitable hiccups in their cash flow. Their outstanding debts were £300,000 and they were looking to raise a maximum of £100,000 as a stand by facility.

We approached one of the independent factoring companies known for both the excellence of their service as well as competitive pricing and they quoted a rate of 0.45% with a minimum of £6,000 for a confidential invoice discounting facility whilst the company approached RBS Invoice Finance directly as they banked with RBS who quoted them exactly double.

It would seem that the favoured method would be for the Government to extend it’s guarantee facility to cover invoice discounting facilities from the major banks and apparently the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA) have been involved in these discussions.

Banks have been shoving many of their customers down the factoring and invoice discounting route for several years as not only are the rewards higher but the security is better as invoice discounting is fully secured by the invoices that are being funded and a properly managed invoice discounting company shouldn’t need a Government guarantee to enable them to offer funding facilities.

If this turns out to be true it will be an unusual step by the ABFA to lobby for guarantees that will only be of use to some of their members but which will give them a huge advantage over the others.

Watch this space