Ian

The Small Business Finance Directory

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Small Business Finance Directory has been launched in an orgy of self promotion with almost every online magazine carrying stories about this joint venture between National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers (NACFB) and Finance and Leasing Association (FLA) and the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA)

It is supposedly “a brand new tool aimed at promoting access to vital funding” and it’s brief is to “help around 60,000 businesses find suitable commercial finance in its first year”

Having had a look at the directory it seems to be little more than a listing of all members of the three organizations with one or two non members added for good measure. Certainly in my own field most of the major factoring brokers that don’t happen to be members of NACFB aren’t listed and far from being designed to help business access suitable funding it seems designed more to make sure that they only find suitable funding via Association members.

Venture Finance have been reading my website

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The Factoring Solutions website has been pretty much unchanged for ten years and one of the comments that I made all those years ago in lighthearted manner was :-

“Despite the importance of selecting the right factoring company it seems that many companies using invoice finance to speed up cash flow still find their factor by looking in Yellow Pages – which is surely why there are so many factoring companies beginning with the letter A”

It seems that Venture Finance have now realised the error of their ways and are now changing their name to ABN AMRO Commercial Finance thus jumping from the back of the queue straight to the front of the chasing pack.

I must admit that I was surprised to hear of the change of name as not only is Venture Finance one of the better known factoring companies as it is but AMN AMRO is probably best known to the average man as the bank that brought RBS to it’s knees thus bearing a large responsibility for the problems within the UK banking industry and therefore the economy today.

Not only that but ABN AMRO Commercial Finance hardly trips easily off the tongue 🙂

Factoring and Google

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Checking Google to see how the factoring brokers and companies are ranking is something that I guess most of us do regularly. Getting a high position whether organically or on the paid for ad section is only half of the battle as you also have to make the strapline appealing enough to make potential customers want to visit your website.

Looking at the various brokers and factoring companies jockeying for position this morning there were two PPC ads that stood out for different reasons.

Firstly Cashflowuk who claimed that they were a “UK factoring broker with over 60 years experience.” Although that may sound appealing to anyone who knows nothing about factoring it is both meaningless and irrelevant as it could mean that they have one person who has been in the business for 60 years or else they have 60 trainees none of whom have been in the business for long.

I would guess that I am possibly the longest in the tooth of all factoring personnel as I’ve been in the factoring business for about 40 years but how relevant is that as the business has changed so much that any knowledge of market conditions prior to the last five years is probably irrelevant anyway.

Still, neither Cashflowuk nor myself are anywhere close to factoringcompare.com who make the bold claim on their website that “You benefit from our 100 years plus experience.” I wonder if they had to close down for the duration of World War 1 whilst they went away to fight in the trenches. 🙂

The second PPC ad to catch my eye was that of Close Invoice Finance as their strapline was that they were the “2010 Credit Today Winner” This is another of those “shoot yourself in the foot” straplines” that amused me in a previous post as the first thing that anybody who takes these awards seriously would do is to look up who was the 2011 Credit Today winner and approach Hitachi Capital Invoice Finance instead.

The only other PPC ads that caught my eye were from Bibby plus Close’s second ad as they were both headed “Factoring Solutions.”  Thanks Guys

Whilst Bibby and Close have just used my company name in their headline the Factoring Solutions award for plagiarism goes to firstfactoruk.com whose website meta description uses the phrase “We know which factoring companies deliver”.  Hmmm I’m sure I’ve seen that strapline somewhere before 🙂

Whilst the above are nothing really more than amusing, the growth of the internet has seen a huge rise in misleading websites and once I have done a little more research I will post again about misleading websites including the “broker” who has a glowing testimonial from a satisfied client who according to Nominet actually owns the website in question – but that’s for another day

Factoring and insolvency practitioners

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Chatting to a another friend from a different independent factoring company yesterday and he told me about the prospective client who had agreed terms etc but a closer look showed him to have the sort of financial problems that would be better served by closing the company down and restarting.

The prospect chose their own insolvency practitioner who promptly got another factoring company involved on the basis that he wouldn’t receive any commission from a deal that he hadn’t introduced.

Unethical?   Just a bit

 

Non recourse factoring issues with bank owned factoring company

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Chatting to a friend in the independent factoring sector he told me that he had been approached by a client of a major high street bank owned factoring company as they had suffered a reasonably significant bad debt which was covered by the bank under their non recourse factoring facility limits and as a result the factoring company suddenly decided to reduce the credit limits on their rest of their customers with a resultant reduction in available funding.

As the client was struggling to operate on the new reduced funding levels the obvious next step was to transfer to a more flexible factoring company but they were told in no uncertain terms that if they did they wouldn’t pay out on the bad debt.

It would seem that this same well known name also claims that if any of their clients becomes insolvent and enters into a CVA or Administration, that also invalidates any bad debts that are still in the system.

To my mind this is highly unethical as I’m sure the same people that thought that one up would be the first to complain if they had a motor insurance claim and the insurers said that they wouldn’t honour it if they transferred to a new insurance company on renewal date.