According to media reports Arbuthnot wish to break into the SME market to “take advantage of big banks’ reluctance to lend to small businesses” and their forthcoming entry into an already overcrowded invoice finance market is one of the ways in which they hope to capitalize on this.

If my memory serves me correctly this will be their third attempt at the factoring market and one has to hope that this latest incarnation will be more successful than the last one.

I seem to recall that Arbuthnot Latham Factors was one of earliest non high street bank factors and one of my colleagues left the company that we then worked at in the late sixties to join them on the South Coast as that was closer to his home than our Croydon office.

Unfortunately I don’t recall what happened to the company but the bank decided to have another crack at factoring and set up Arbuthnot Commercial Services in 1994 but 14 years later that found itself with a few problems and was sold to Bibby where I guess it was absorbed into Bibby’s Southern office.

At a time when the independent sector are working hard to stand still it’s not really the best time to launch yet another provider as the market is already saturated but I wish them the best of luck anyway and hope that it’s third time lucky