According to Nominet the domain was owned by an anonymous person in the home counties but I had a sneaking suspicion that there was more to this website than met the eye as the website was the recipient of inbound links from none other than my old friends Touch Financial Support with the word factoring on Touch’s inside pages being keyword linked to this anonymous site.

All has now been revealed as I had a call from a broking buddy today to tell me that the Nominet details had been changed and the domain name was now showing as owned by SFP Brokers LTD trading as Touch Financial.

It will be interesting to see what happens now as the website as it stands hardly inspires confidence but if it’s over developed like their main site it could end up suffering the same fate and being dumped into the boondocks by Google

Well that title can now be well and truly buried thanks to the entrance into the commercial lending market of Wonga – yes, them of 4,200% APR fame.

Wonga will be offering loans to businesses of between £3,000 and £10,000 which will be available for terms of between one and 52 weeks. The cost, including a variable application fee and interest, will start at 0.3% a week and the loans will have to be repaid in weekly instalments.

The phrase “will start at 0.3% a week” sounds quite good but one has to wonder what realistic rates will actually be

Normally one would be proud to be the recipient of such a nomination except that in this particular case the email was addresssed to a non existent person at a non existent company as it’s a spare email address that I have for anti spam purposes but which I’ve never actually used.

The email asks me to confirm that I’m happy to be shortlisted for this prestigious award so perhaps I should tell them that I am honoured and then ask you all to vote for me/him

I have only looked at pure factoring figures as I believe that the stats including invoice discounting are heavily skewed by the small number of extremely large companies that have been included.

In terms of client numbers the factoring subsidiaries of the big four banks have 66% of the total clients but Bibby Financial Services with just over 20% market share in terms of client numbers is way ahead of any other independent leaving the remaining couple of dozen other independents scrapping over a 14% share.

It would seem that yet again the factoring companies made no overall progress with the number of companies using factoring and invoice discounting facilities hardly moving at all although the funding provided to them increased overall.

The most worrying figure though was the fact that the overall net gain of 408 clients was achieved by taking on 11,121 new clients and losing 10,713 clients in the same period.

The 10,713 clients lost in the period equates to one quarter of the total client portfolio at the end of the previous year and that is a truly worrying statistic.

Two figures that I would like to see revealed are the amount of fees levied overall to failed clients as termination fees and the amounts received by insolvency practitioners from failed factoring and invoice discounting clients as I have a sneaking suspicion that the amounts would be quite shocking

A representative of ABFA obviously struggling for something positive to write stated that “The new figures show that increasingly larger firms are choosing invoice finance because of both its inherent strengths and its availability. The overall figures are a strong endorsement of invoice finance and show that it continues to grow in popularity, not the least because firms which use it are able to grow and increase their turnover.”

I think that one of the main reasons why larger firms are choosing invoice finance is because their bankers are giving them no other opportunity as the banks’s own security position is much better with invoice finance rather than the traditional overdraft and I’m not sure that losing one quarter of clients and just about managing to replace them constitutes a growth in popularity either.

A Google search for factoring solutions last week came up with a result in 11th place headed:-

My website which has been online since 1999 currently starts off with “Factoring and invoice discounting is being used by over 41,000 companies UK wide” and what is more I have used similar phrasing since 2003

It would seem that Touch Financial Support have cleverly manipulated the meta tags on the website in what looks like an attempt to try and lure people there who are actually looking for my Factoring Solutions website

The H1 title on Touch Financial Support’s web page is headed “Benefits of using Factoring Solutions” and as the webbies reading this will know, Google attaches importance to the H1 titles.

Whatever Touch Financial may claim to the contrary “Benefits of using Factoring Solutions” is hardly correct grammatically and the upper case S in Solutions gives the game away anyway.

As if that wasn’t enough there are further references throughout the page as follows:-

The benefits of using Factoring solutions is that cash flow is assured

Businesses seeking Factoring solutions have two options

What’s the cost of using Factoring solutions?

Naturally, one of the key considerations when thinking about Factoring solutions is the amount it will cost

If you believe that Factoring solutions could be for you the next step could be to contact Touch Financial to compare quotes

In my mind there is no doubt what Touch Financial Support are trying to do and whilst it’s quite legal the question that I ask is whether it’s ethical or not.

I know that some of my competitors read this blog so if anyone from Cashflow UK is looking in you might want to have a look at  www dot touchfinancial.co.uk/knowledge-centre/guides/factoring/factoring-uk as they have tried the same trick on you with this page deliberately designed to try and lure people searching for Factoring UK as your company used to be called.

I did contact Touch Financial Support asking them if they were finding these tactics fruitful but apart from a standard email thanking me for contacting them they didn’t bother to respond further.