Venture Finance

Venture Finance Direct has been shut down

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It seems that the Venture Finance experiment to automate the whole factoring process and offer a stripped down facility online to the smaller enterprises has not been successful and is being closed down.

It was an interesting concept starting off with an online application form but it would appear that the applicants / clients were of poor quality and the whole concept was causing too many problems and losses so had to end.

Where are the companies who have been turned down by everyone else going to go now 🙂

Factoring company of the year silly season is here again

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Whilst I’ve been away sunning myself over Easter my inbox has been filling up with emails from various factoring companies telling me about the awards that they had won (or were nominated for)

First off was an email from Skipton Business Finance by way of an introduction to the writer in which he stated that “There has been a lot of positive changes to personnel within SBF over the last 12 months which has lead us to achieve the ‘UK Factoring & Invoice Discounting Provider of the year award 2009’ at the ACQ Global Awards 2009” I wasn’t quite sure how to take the bit about the fact that it was the positive changes to personnel that lead to the award as I’m not sure if it meant that they had got rid of the people that stopped them getting the award in the past or had employed a factoring superhero or two.

The second email was from Venture Finance to tell me that they had been voted winners yet again of a prestigious award but I’m afraid that I can’t remember which as I accidentally deleted the email.

The third was a slightly unusual press release as it was from Oriel Collections who were jumping the gun a bit as they hadn’t actually won anything but had been short listed for “Commercial Credit Team of the Year” in the Credit Today awards.

Interestingly enough one of the three companies mentioned above has a terrible reputation in the industry for service and Factoring Solutions has received quite a few enquiries from it’s disgruntled clients in the past but there again I don’t suppose that winning an award actually has much to do with service anyway.

The shortlist for “Factor & Discounter of the Year” for the Credit Today awards comprises the following luminaries – Ashley Commercial Finance, Bibby Financial Services, Cattles Invoice Finance,  HSBC Bank and Venture Finance. It makes me wonder how a company manages to get itself shortlisted for such an award. The staff and clients of Cattles haven’t known whether or not they were coming or going in the past few months whilst HSBC have been keeping selected brokers in champagne by offloading clients that they decided no longer fit their new criteria.

I will make the same comment that I made last time I wrote about silly season that the two factoring companies I use most of all have service levels far higher than most coupled with competitive pricing and unlike at least one of the factoring companies mentioned above are still actively looking for business yet neither of them has ever won diddly squat.

It’s a strange world

Factoring company of the year is…..

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Almost all of them.

We were approached by a company last week that was looking for a factoring facility and having read our website they were interested in our recommendations. The MD mentioned that he had already approached Cattles Invoice Finance on the basis that they were award winners to which my response was that almost all factoring companies were award winners somewhere or another.

Looking at the factoring and invoice discounting companies’ website I noticed that Cattles were proudly proclaiming to have won the Business Innovation of the Year award at the National Business Awards’ North West regional finals.

Moving onto Close Invoice Finance and they are claiming the Business Moneyfacts Best Factoring and Invoice Discounting Provider award for the third year running whilst Venture Finance are the winners of the Credit Today Factor Discounter of the Year for the second year running.

Perhaps the most amusing website is that of Bibby Factors where they are proud of the fact that they were voted best factor and discounter by NACFB 2003 2004 2005 2006 thus prompting the question “What happened in 2007 then”

In addition to the above I went to the annual Dealmakers Dinner late last year which included an awards ceremony and GE Commercial Finance managed to win the Dealmakers Asset Based Lending award of the year.

I have no doubt that the clearing bank factors have also won a shelf full of awards between them as I seem to recall that Lloyds TSB was the victor at the Dealmakers Dinner in the previous year.

Oddly enough we introduced the prospective client that started me thinking about awards to one of the few factoring companies that doesn’t seem to have won an award at all even though they consistantly offer an above average service at competitive rates.

Venture Finance ownership

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Venture Finance was unwittingly caught up in the problems surrounding Fortis as Fortis had supposedly acquired them as part of the carve up of ABN Amro but had then been told to divest themselves of the ABN assets as part of their own rescue by various Governments.

Venture Finance remains part of the ABN Amro group which in turn is now owned by the Dutch Government so we are pleased to see that their foundation is now secure.

Factoring PR blunders

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In these fast moving and difficult times one has to be doubly careful of press releases and PR exercises as they may leave you with egg on your face at a later stage.

The current edition of the glossy magazine Business Money has a full colour cover devoted to Landsbanki which will no doubt continue to be an embarrassment to it’s editor until the next edition comes out whilst Venture Finance sent out a press release on 25th September telling the world about the new larger premises that they were moving into on 1st October in order to facilitate the integration of all the extra people upon their integration with Fortis. This was less than two weeks before the announcement that Fortis was being nationalised and the integration would now no longer be going ahead.

Ian