The long running saga of the sale of Cattles Invoice Finance has at last been announced with the purchasor being the private equity house AnaCap Financial Partners LLP who have been lurking in the wings for quite a while.
Whilst the announcement is now “old news” it did come when I was away sunning myself in Cyprus and whilst I thought about writing something for the blog at the time the amount of effort required to research and write something via Blackberry was too much like hard work.
Having belatedly read the press release dated 10th August I was interested to read the comment attributed to Doug Crawford that “The invoice finance industry is enjoying unprecedented growth in the current financial climate………”
The statistics for the factoring industry issued by the ABFA for the last couple of quarters show that far from enjoying “unprecedented growth” the industry has seen a drop in value of sales factored as well as the number of clients availing themselves of the services but I now await with great interest the figures for the quarter ended 30th June (which should be available shortly) to see the official confirmation of this growth.
Reading a lengthier press release from last week I notice that Doug Crawford also commented that “We look forward to unveiling our new corporate identity in due course and continuing our already impressive growth as the UK’s leading independent business funder.”
I assume that Doug isn’t referring to the new corporate identity of Absolute Invoice Finance which we unveiled in the Factoring Blog four months ago 🙂
It’s also amazing what a difference the ommission of a couple of simple words like “one of” can make to an article as I think that Bibby might have something to say about Cattles Invoice Finance being “the UK’s leading independent business funder” as with four times the number of clients Bibby are considerably larger.
I am writing an article about the Cattles Invoice sale to AnaCap for a magazine called Corporate Financier and I would be interested in talking to anyone who has been following the whole Cattles story over the past few months.
What do you think of the deal? Do you think it makes sense? Will it help shareholders?
If any of you have a background of some kind in private equity or corporate finance or the financial services industry more generally, I’d be particularly interested in hearing from you.
My direct UK line is 01908 234952 (international +44 1908 234952).
Brian Bollen